War Protestors Vindicated?

From the Washington Post:

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."

Only very, very few people are pleased to see this war fail as a spite to the legacy of George W. Bush. I never supported this war. However, I desperately wish that I would have been proven wrong. But this is hardly the time to spend too much time contemplating those old wounds.

There is no time to gloat about who was right and who was wrong. It's time to look at the people who accurately forecast this disaster and ask them what we should do. The media failed us in the buildup to the war by allowing their front pages to be a bully pulpit for the Administration. Now the media has a chance to reach out to people like Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni and amplify his voice. The WaPo talks to Zinni, but they don't follow up on the most important issue at hand:

Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, formerly the top U.S. military man in the Middle East, started where Odom started -- in opposition to the war. Zinni argued that going into Iraq would destabilize the region and distract from the fight against al-Qaeda.

For his opposition, he says he was accused by some fellow officers of having political motivations and was disinvited from attending meetings at the Joint Forces Command, where he'd been a regular as a senior mentor for more junior officers.

But he diverges from most early critics of the war, because he now is arguing that withdrawing from Iraq would destabilize the region. Instead, he says, a new strategic framework for the war is needed -- something far broader than the increase Bush has proposed, which Zinni calls a "half-step."

"It's breaking my heart, watching it," he says of the war. "I was praying somehow I'd be wrong, but in my heart of hearts I knew it would happen this way -- the bad decision-making, the insufficient troops."

Congress now is mulling varying resolutions on the war, but Zinni complains that "the debate is wrong. I think Congress is debating the arrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic."

But the ship, he argues, doesn't have to go down.

Hey Washington Post! If Zinni was right about the war and is now discussing a broader strategic framework, then follow up on it. I absolutely agree that we need to we need to pursue a broader strategy that will prevent destabilizing Iraq. (Hell, I blogged about it a few hours before reading this article!) I'd like to know what he has to say. If it's a workable idea, then it's time to spread the message and help support the idea by any means possible. It's not too late to save Iraq, but it will be if we allow Bush to keep digging us deeper while we sit around and discuss events four years past.