The Cassandra gig

Just for fun, let's take a look at the predictions I made on March 9 re Iraq and Bush:

* Bush has made it clear we're going. So, we're going. Hard to tell what the justification will be, as that keeps changing every 15 minutes, but there you go.

Yup. Got that.

* We'll never find any weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraqi hands. That's because there aren't any.

2 for 2.

* We may, however, a la the Rampart Division of the LAPD, plant some, so we can courageously "find" them.

Not yet, though you can hear between the lines that they're tempted. The hydrogen trucks represented as "mobile bio labs" look like that's as close as they're going to get. Note that I said "may", though. :)

* Bush's approval ratings will be stated to soar. You'll still know very few people who actually like the man or his policies.

They did at the time, officially, and have been subsiding since. That no one appears to like the man or his policies aside from the warbloggers, dittoheads, or people with a vested interest in Bush's success still appears to be anecdotally true.

* Iraq will be a pushover. Mostly because it doesn't have anything to really fight with.

Right again.

* North Korea, which does have WMD and an advance position close to one of our allies, will continue to be treated in the wimpiest way possible.

Bingo. As has Iran, which almost certainly also has nukes at this point.

* Despite high ratings -- and possibly even winning the 2004 election -- sooner or later there will be a huge scandal showing Bush to be the hypocite I'm pretty sure he is.

Not yet, though YellowCakeGate was looking so promising. On the other hand, one of the first acts this Administration did was to put previous Administrations' papers under lock and seal, and repeated reports keep coming out about how very paranoid they are about putting anything down on paper. I suspect the reason YellowCakeGate had the legs it did was because it was based on documents. I also suspect that many things got shredded and/or wiped to NSA standards as the kerfluffle unfolded.

* A contributing factor to the scandal -- speaking of "connecting the dots" -- will be that knowledge is in the hands of one or more journalists right now that could blow the thing open... But it's being held back.

Again, not yet.

So, lessee... 8 total predictions. 4 clearly right. 1 mostly right (poll numbers). 1 probably wrong, but conditional. 2, too early to tell.

So I was at least 50% spot on, 63% if we're generous, and am still in the running for being 88% right if the chips fall the right way.

Not too shabby. Worth remembering next time you hear, "No one thought there were no WMDs before the war!"

Clarification

Let's take a closer look at something I just said:

* Iraq will be a pushover. Mostly because it doesn't have anything to really fight with.

Right again.

But the occupation has been problematic. How much of a "pushover" is Iraq right now?

The answer to that is mostly in my post of March 30, where I made a comment about an article of Thomas Friedman's. Using his analogy of Iraq being like a Let's Make a Deal prize, I said there was an increasing possibility that what it contains is a note saying, "Congratulations! You just won Palestine. Only there's 80 times more land mass, and 9 times more people."

I then went on to point out that the Israelis have never been able to subdue the Palestinians, even though they've had fifty years to try, and have been willing to use much more force than we're likely to.

Nothing in that has really changed -- we're an occupying force viewed as invaders by the locals, and they're going to continue to kill 3-5 troops per week at minimum until we leave.

So, yes, knocking Iraqi Dumpty off the wall was a "pushover". Putting Iraq back together again is probably damn near impossible -- same as with Palestine.