Here's one apologizing....
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/opinion/22KRIS.html?ex=1051588800&en=28ec504ac5045bfe&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE OP-ED COLUMNIST
I Said That?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
ast September, a gloom-and-doom columnist warned about Iraq: "If we're going to invade, we need to prepare for a worst-case scenario involving street-to-street fighting."
Ahem. Yes, well, that was my body double while I was on vacation.
Since I complained vigorously about this war before it started, it's only fair for me to look back and acknowledge that many of the things that I — along with other doves — worried about didn't happen. So let's look back, examine the record and offer some preliminary accountability.
Despite my Cassandra columns, Iraq never carried out terrorist attacks in the U.S. or abroad, it didn't use chemical or biological weapons, and it didn't launch missiles against Israel in hopes of triggering a broader war. Turkey has not invaded northern Iraq to attack the Kurds.
So let me start by tipping my hat to administration planners whose work reduced those risks. For example, one reason Iraq did not attack Israel may have been the Special Operations forces in the western desert of Iraq, where the launches would have come from. And belated pressure from Washington has kept Turkey out of the war so far.
The most curious aspect of the war was Iraq's failure to use weapons of mass destruction, and neither most doves nor most hawks get credit for predicting that. If the U.S somehow blocked Iraq from using them, a deep bow to President Bush. But if Iraq never had any weaponized chemical or biological agents, then Mr. Bush has plenty of explaining to do to the children of the Americans and the Iraqis who died in the war.
President Bush, in his State of the Union address, described a vast Iraqi weapons program and talked about several mobile labs, 30,000 munitions, 500 tons of chemical weapons, 25,000 liters of anthrax and 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin. These weapons were supposedly deployed in the war and controlled by field commands that we have long since overrun — so where are they?
It's too early to be sure, but my guess is that doves cried wolf in terms of the risks of upheavals in Pakistan and Jordan. Indeed, that alarm has been raised repeatedly — at the time of the first gulf war, again with the Afghanistan war and now with the Iraq war — and the worries proved exaggerated each time. True, radicals came to power in parts of Pakistan, but on the whole the Muslim Street has not been as scary as we expected. Maybe it's time to retire that bogeyman.
No one got the level of resistance quite right. We doves correctly foresaw that the war would not be a cakewalk, but for all our hand-wringing, there was never prolonged street-to-street fighting in Baghdad.
The ones who really blew it were the superraptors like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and, to a lesser extent, Paul Wolfowitz, who over the years had suggested, as Mr. Perle put it in a Washington Post essay in 1998: "It would be neither wise nor necessary for us to send ground forces into Iraq" because Iraqi exiles could do the job by themselves with American weapons and air cover. Fortunately, Tommy Franks and Colin Powell demanded more than an Invasion Lite pipedream.
As for the reaction of the Iraqi people, I'd say the doves were more accurate than the hawks. Frankly, the reaction varied hugely. There were some places where, as Vice President Dick Cheney had forecast, our troops were "greeted as liberators." But even in the Shiite south, one feels as much menace as gratitude.
Those Americans who contend that Iraqis hail us as liberators should try traveling around Iraq. I grew a mustache to look more like an Iraqi so hostile locals wouldn't throw rocks at my car. (I've now returned to the U.S. and had to shave my mustache so my family wouldn't throw stones at me.)
The hawks also look increasingly naïve in their expectations that Iraq will soon blossom into a pro-American democracy. For now, the figures who inspire mass support in postwar Iraq are Shiite clerics like Ali al-Sistani (moderate, but tainted by being soft on Saddam), Moqtadah al-Sadr (radical son of a martyr) and Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim (Iran's candidate), all of whom criticize the United States.
As in revolutionary Iran, the Shiite network is the major network left in Iraq, and it will help determine the narrative of the war: infidel invasion or friendly liberation. I'm afraid we infidels had better look out.