The guys who got it right

In the run up to the Iraq war we saw and heard a great deal from individuals promoting the war: William Safire, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Peter Beinart and others of their ilk were nearly ubiquitous on the television news talk shows, on the editorial pages, pushing the case for a war some of them had been advocating for a decade or more.

There were a few dissenters. Phil Donahue tried to host guests who challenged the administration's case. For his pains, his MSNBC show was canceled. Howard Dean gave a speech a month before the war that was nearly prophetic in anticipating the future course of events in Iraq. It's worth reading if you haven't - the degree of accurate understanding of what might (and, to a large extent, did) happen is breathtaking. For his foresight, Dean was labeled a "nut", "unpatriotic", and roundly vilified.

However, nobody got things as "right" as Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel.

Landay and Strobel were both senior reporters for Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy), and in the run up to the war they were amongst the very few writers consistently challenging the administration's claims on nearly every topic - the existence of WMDs in Iraq, the alleged ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda, the significance of the "aluminum tubes" the administraton claimed were intended for centrifuge manufacturing, Iraq's alleged nuclear programs. On point after point, Landy and Strobel's contacts inside the government and intel agencies were painting a very different picture for them than the administration was painting for the country.

Unlike individuals such as George Tenet, who were also aware of this all along but waited four years to let everyone know, Landay and Strobel were publishing at the time, voices in the wilderness, crying for attention but receiving none while reporters such as Judy Miller of the NY Times were printing near-propaganda pieces echoing the administration talking points.

As we now know, on point after point, Landy and Strobel were right. Kristol, Beinart, Krauthammer, et. al., were all wrong.

In any "rational" world, you would think the individuals who were so completely, demonstrably wrong for so long about so many things would be shunned, their views sidelined. You would especially think this given the alleged "liberal" bias of the national media. You would think.

Krauthammer continues as a national syndicated columnist for the Washington Post. Beinart is an editor-at-large for the influential periodical The New Republic, as well as a regular contributor to the Post. Kristol is editor of The Weekly Standard and a regular guest on Fox News where, among other things, he now advocates yet another war, this one with Iran.

Landay and Strobel continue to work for McClatchy, where they write articles disputing the case for war with Iran and don't get regular invitations to appear as guests on Fox news. Neither has been hired to replace Miller at the NY Times (she resigned as part of a leak scandal, not for her poor pre-war reporting). Virtually no one has heard of them.

Apparently, it pays to be wrong.