Thomas Ricks

Barack Obama sure is getting support for his Libyan attack from what on the surface would seem a lot of unlikely sources.

On Sunday's "Meet the Press," Pulitzer Prize-winning Iraq war critic Tom Ricks told David Gregory, "All Obama is saying is give war a chance" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

At The Corner on NRO, former Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner greeted the new "Victory at Last" Iraq cover story in Newsweek by throwing a hardball back at Iraq pessimists in the media, like Time’s Joe Klein and Tom Ricks of The Washington Post, who insisted the Iraq war was a "fiasco" and the surge was ridiculous:

Those like Joe Klein and Tom Ricks, who claimed the Iraq war was "probably the biggest foreign policy mistake in American history" (Klein's words) and "the biggest mistake in the history of American foreign policy" (Ricks's words), were wrong. Ricks went so far as to say in 2009 that "I think staying in Iraq is immoral."

Now, if we had followed the counsel of Klein and Ricks and not implemented the surge, their predictions might have been closer to the mark. (Bush's decision was one of "adolescent petulance" and "the decision to surge was made unilaterally, without adequate respect for history or military doctrine," Klein wrote on April 5, 2007.) As it is, if the positive trajectory of events continue and Iraq does end up reshaping the political culture of the Arab Middle East, the Iraq war will, on balance, have advanced American interests in the region.

Sunday's Book World section in The Washington Post was devoted, as its cover suggested, to "Iraq: Six books on the lives lost, the money spent and the opportunities squandered." The cover photo implied two American soldiers pointing guns at a terrified and bloodied Iraqi man. Every book reviewed was a liberal book on Iraq or the broader Middle East, and every one was pronounced as wise. But the worst page was Page Six, devoted to "startling parallels" between the American revolution and the Iraqi insurgency, between King George III and George W. Bush...and between our Founding Fathers and Iraqi terrorists?

The Post's senior military correspondent Thomas Ricks reviewed a "brilliant, classic history of the American Revolution" (Piers Mackesy's The War in America, 1775-1783) as a means of attacking Bush's strategic cluelessness: "Five years into their war to retain control of America, the British thought they were winning." But a year later, all was lost by the British. Is Ricks rooting for a "fiasco" to match forever the title of his anti-Iraq war book? The review's title was "Then and Now: The startling parallels between the Iraq War and the American Revolution." Between a painting of George III and George Bush was a text box: "These two wartime leaders might end up having more in common than just their first name."