Jonah Goldberg: more unintentional irony

The Doughy Pantload has an op-ed in Today’s Times arguing that we must stay in Iraq to prevent a genocide which isn’t happening now yet might occur if we leave:

It’s worth at least pointing out a key difference between the potential genocide in Iraq and the heart-wrenching slaughters in Congo and Sudan: The latter aren’t our fault. But if genocide unfolds in Iraq after American troops depart, it would be hard to argue that we weren’t at least partly to blame. Yes, the mass murder would have more immediate authors than the United States of America, but we would undeniably be responsible, at least in part, for giving a green light to genocide.

What’s noteworthy and ironic is Pantload’s miserable record of predictions on Iraq. Like this one, for example:

I predict that Iraq won’t have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time [by Feb. 2007], agree that the war was worth it.

So now, two years later, the civil war Goldberg said would never happen has started, and Pantload is predicting a “genocide” if we don’t keep 135,000 troops in Iraq, trying with limited success to keep the warring factions from killing each other.

Throughout the war, the conservative chorus in response to the mounting deaths amongst Iraq’s population was to discount them, or to compare them to the deaths which Saddam hypothetically would have inflicted on the population, had we not toppled his government, mismanaged a failed occupation, and turned the whole country into an anarchical shithole.

After years of blithely discounting moral objections to our Iraq policy and pooh-poohing the scope of the Bush administration’s failures and the consequences of those failures, Pantload argues that we have a moral obligation to stay in Iraq under the same inept leadership because we’re responsible for the sorry state of affairs.

The sad fact is that our continued presence is not halting sectarian violence, and the Iraqi regime which Goldberg optimistically predicted would unify the country is incapable of taking the necessary steps to achieve a political resolution among the warring factions. And, naturally, he wants to blame the Democrats — especially Obama, who opposed the invasion from the start — for failing to stop the violent convulsions which are the consequences of the policies he and other Corner dunderheads championed and defended well past the point where any sanitary resolution of Iraq’s miseries could be accomplished by US power.

Iraq will undoubtedly be disordered and racked by civil violence when our troops leave, as they inevitably must. The supposed panacea of training Iraqi troops and security forces is farcical, given the lack of progress in the last four years, and the influence of Iraq’s warring factions within the structure of those forces themselves. But Iraq is disordered and racked by civil violence now. The notion that we need to stay to prevent Pantload-predicted violence of Genocide far beyond the lesser strife of civil conflict which Goldberg previously predicted would never happen would be comical, were not so many people already dead, and so many still dying, because of the lack of intelligence and vision of the Goldbergs of the world.