Iraq Budget Surplus?

Why do we have such a hard time hearing good news from Baghdad? - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

I'm starting to think that Slate has folks that realize that even if one has a liberal bent, being reality based can be a good thing. The link to the NYT story is amazing, one would think that it was BAD news that Iraq has a budget surplus, they are selling oil, and their gravediggers are unemployed! Well, I suppose if less than a year ago you were reporting with confidence that the surge was a failure, Iraq was in civil war, and the situation was militarily hopeless, and it REALLY was more important for you to be "right" than for millions of people to be saved from murder and the US to be spared a terrorist base worse than Afghanistan ever was, then I guess it would be "bad news".

I especially liked this paragraph:

It is in no spirit of revenge that I remind you that, as little as a
year ago, the whole of smart liberal opinion believed that the
dissolution of Baathism and militarism had been a mistake, that Iraq
itself was a bottomless pit of wasted dollars and pointless casualties,
and that the only option was to withdraw as fast as possible and let
the inevitable civil war burn itself out. To the left of that liberal
consensus, people of the caliber and quality of Michael Moore were describing
the nihilist "insurgents" as the moral equivalent of the Minutemen, and
to the right of the same consensus, people like Pat Buchanan were
hinting that we had been cheated into the whole enterprise by a certain
minority whose collective name began with the letter J.

Don't expect most liberals to do any navel gazing about how they might have been wrong and what it might say about them to feel bad as lives are saved and US safety is obviously improved. There is NOTHING more important to a liberal than believing that they are intellectually superior, so it just isn't going to happen.