It will end in disaster...
I don't think it "means" anything, but this page of "told you so"s by Guardian columnists really does look like the ones that greeted the on-line clicker during what nobody realized was the final phase of the Afghanistan campaign. The fact that they were mostly wrong then doesn't mean that they are wrong now, of course. Some conservative commentators have been showing the desperate character of their hope, perhaps, by emphasizing that predictions of doom and disaster from this lot were the harbinger of victory the last time around, crediting the usual suspects with a kind of reverse prescience. But a George Monbiot column isn't an omen. He'd have written it regardless of circumstances; he will continue to write it, a version of it, week in, week out, till he can write no more. Nobody knows what's going to happen in any detail with any certainty. The risks and perils, the challenges, are greater this time, though many had a similar assessment of the r.s, the p.s, and the c.s of Afghanistan. We're going to win, but it will be a complicated victory, however events arrange themselves.
Still, as before, maybe even more than before, this crowd really do seem to be enjoying themselves, to relish the prospect of defeat, failure, doom. I know Monbiot's grinning photo was taken long before Iraq emerged as the mouse that just might, God willing, bring down the behemoth, but I have no doubt that he was indeed thinking "it will end in disaster" as it was snapped. Last time it took them a bit longer than a week to reach such concord of defeatism, each perfectly in tune, in step, in phase with the others (Aaronovitch being, as usual, the odd man out, and Zoe Williams, who is perhaps no fool, avoiding the subject altogether.) They're getting better at this. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose, but a bit unseemly nonetheless.
Posted by Dr. Frank at April 1, 2003 08:29 AM | TrackBack