How exactly is it ‘arrogant’? It’s the same desire manifest after hearing the most awful auditioners in American Idol: we wish them no harm, provided their singing voice never assaults us again.

It’s Megan who should consider the benefits of humility. Is it really too much to ask that she sit out pontificating the next war?

And as such weren’t exposed to the constant rain of vomit and incessant hurling of feces that those of us did oppose the war were subjected to – which probably influences our reactions a bit now.

Oh nonsense. It doesn’t require “hindsight bias” to accurately predict a lifelong drunk, playboy, and failure would mess up any significant endeavor. It doesn’t require “hindsight bias” to accurately predict that a utopian, utterly non-conservative project would fail.

And you wonder why people like Megan are loathe to listen to you. Even when you’re right, you’re so appallingly arrogant. Megan’s post was misguided and wrong headed. I supported the war before hand, and I came out of the experience realizing just how little I understood about the Middle East, Sunnis, Shia’s and Iraq. It will certainly change my thinking about military action going forward.

That said, I can’t help but feel dirty and asahmed to be on the same side as someone as horrid as Aimai. Try a dose of humility, you all-knowing God, you. Sheesh, the arrogance of some people. Smart, intelligent people are wrong…all the time. Even you, no matter who you are.

Meanwhile, the “risks” of not invading so shrilly touted by the prowar side — nuclear weapons carried by balsa wood drones piloted by al Qaeda; hell, the notion that Iraq posed any threat at all to the US — never did pass the smell test.

If someone gets drunk, insists on driving, and insists that everything will turn out just fine, and one responds by noting that driving drunk could result in a totaled car, an arrest, the driver or someone else getting killed, all of those are perfectly valid risks. If the drunk proceeds to total the car and get arrested, he or she doesn’t get to point out that no one got killed to claim that his or her dissuaders “got their predictions wrong.”

Even if they’re reflexively opposed to driving drunk.

Given McArdle’s obvious affinity for straw men, it’s clear that if she doesn’t recall the antiwar arguments, it’s because she was never listening — deafened by the drums of war she was banging, perhaps.

Indeed, I’d say that for many, their distrust of Bush could be called reflexive.

Which camp was right on that score, Galt? Whose credibility has sunk right along the S.S. Bush’s?

(For my part, I opposed the war mostly for the same reasons George H.W. Bush and Colin Powell cited for not taking Baghdad in 1991, and I for one don’t remember the hawks addressing their position with anything but predictions of being “greeted as liberators. Chumps.)