No I-Told-You-Sos

Opponents of the Iraq War Voice Pain, Not Vindication, At Predictions They Could Only Hope Would Be Wrong

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 4, 2007; D01

Sweet vindication. Who wouldn't want it? To be right. To be free of criticism and upheld by evidence, by actual proof, that one's predictions about a controversial war were correct.

It is the culture of this town -- trafficking in rightness. People clamor day in and day out, in that polished and politic way of the Washingtonian, to be proved right.

But on Iraq, the vindicated are pained. There is no gloating -- not with thousands of people dead, Americans and Iraqis; not with the Iraq war precipitating an ongoing foreign policy crisis that has left the United States' global image in tatters.

For people who were pilloried, penalized or warned to be careful because of their opposition to a powerful president's war, vindication is nothing to celebrate. It is a victory most bitter.

"Emotionally, it's a very traumatic and unhappy outcome." That is retired Army Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, head of the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan. "How can you be happy about being right about the disaster that's been created?"

It weighs on him.

"Vindication is not pleasing," he says. "Even some of my friends have noted: the more vindicated I've been, the more irritable I become."

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