printOn April 30, 2003 I wrote the following:
According to figures provided by Yale professor William Nordhaus and the Council of Foreign Relations, the eventual costs of the war on Iraq will be roughly $1.2 trillion.
Very many libertarians debated—and were familiar with—this estimate.
On March 17, 2006, MSNBC’s Martin Wolk finally awoke and wrote:
One estimate puts the total economic impact [of the war] at up to $2 trillion.
On May 28, 2004, I noted in amazement that the neoconservative talking twits [have] been wrong all along about the invasion of Iraq. Their utter ignorance of geopolitical realities had them insisting our soldiers would be greeted with blooms and bonbons and that an Iraqi democracy would rise from the torrid sands of Mesopotamia. They’ve consistently dished out dollops of ahistoric, unintuitive, and reckless verbiage.
They were wrong all along, yet they’ve retained their status as philosopher-kings.
On the other hand—and unfortunately for America—there hasn’t been a horror in Iraq that certain libertarian prescients did not foretell well in advance.
And I asked: “So why are insightful commentators, whose observations have predictive power, generally barred from the national discourse, while false neoconservative prophets are called back for encores?”
The answer I gave in 2004 applies today:
Elites—media included—can rule only if they represent ideologies that are widely embraced, as the invasion of Iraq was. Today’s news is not what it used to be because a dumbed-down population, well represented in newsrooms, cannot distinguish evidence from assertion and fact from feel-good fiction. News is now nothing but a slick, demand-driven product designed to please—not inform—the populace. Having their worldview affirmed—even affirmed in a parallel universe—is worth a lot to news consumers, who are keener to avoid the pains of cognitive dissonance than to get the real deal.