I've been thinking about human beings' myopia so clearly demonstrated here. All of these writers equated victory in Iraq with overwhelming its defenses. And yet- they MUST have known that the combination of troops, tanks, bombs and airpower could have only one possible outcome. They MUST have known that. We, on the Mudcat, knew. So why did none of them see beyond?

Here are some of them:

Brit Hume, Fox News, April 2003: "The majority of the American media who were in a position to comment upon the progress of the war in the early going, and even after, got it wrong. They didn't get it just a little wrong. They got it completely wrong."

Morton Kondracke, Fox News, April 2003: "Well, the hot story of the week is victory. The Tommy Franks-Don Rumsfeld battle plan, war plan, worked brilliantly, a three- week war with mercifully few American deaths or Iraqi civilian deaths. There is a lot of work yet to do, but all the naysayers have been humiliated so far. The final word on this is, Hooray."

Fred Barnes, Fox News, April 2003: "The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war."

Chris Matthews, MSNBC, April 2003: "Why don't the damn Democrats give the president his day? He won today. He did well today."

Jeff Birnbaum, Fox News, May 2003: "It is amazing how thorough the victory in Iraq really was in the broadest context… and the silence, I think, is that it's clear that nobody can do anything about it. There isn't anybody who can stop him. The Democrats cannot oppose him politically."

Tony Snow, Fox News, April 2003: "Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom that boldness on the battlefields produces swift and relatively bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptics' complaints."

Bob Arnot, MSNBC, April 2003: "Chris,, more than anything else, real vindication for the administration. One, credible evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Two, you know what? There were a lot of terrorists here, really bad guys. I saw them."

Alan Colmes, Fox News, April 2003: "But first, now that the war in Iraq is all but over, should the people in Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?"

Bill O'Reilly, Fox News, January 2003: I will bet you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego that military action will not last more than a week. Are you willing to take that wager?"

Joe Scarborough, MSNBC, April 2003:
"I'm waiting to hear the words, 'I was wrong,' from some of the world's most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types… Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis K8ucinich and all those others, will step forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don't call them 'elitests' for nothing."