Mirror, mirror

Atrios links (hilariously) to this piece from last spring by the Weekly Standard's Jonathan Last, in which he gloated -- rather prematurely -- that the antiwar folks had been proven wrong, wrong, wrong about the invasion of Iraq.

Oddly enough, nearly all of the instances Last cites have, in the intervening months, been proven right, right, right. Most notable is this, from Salon's Scott Rosenberg:

But, as we have heard the military saying goes, "Hope is not a plan." The plan was Bush's and Cheney's and Rumsfeld's, and as a result of it, hundreds of thousands of American and British soldiers are now stuck in what could prove to be a much more harrowing situation than those planners promised. . . .

And this, from Tina Brown in the London Times:

The pre-invasion hype had all been about festive Iraqis stocking up on flowers to give the kind of toothy colonial welcome the Queen gets from dancing Maoris on a royal tour. Now look what's happened. Our boys are faced with a medieval siege of Baghdad, and the reprisals of Saddam's death squads, with nothing to prepare the American public but the DVD of "Black Hawk Down."

But the most accurate assessment, in the end, was Last's conclusion -- though it probably did not occur to him that it would ultimately apply directly to his own work:

But why should anyone take them seriously? They've been proven wrong on the question of the day and then failed to demonstrate any serious capacity for introspection. They're not public thinkers. They're not journalists. They're activists.

Indeed, Jonathan.