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Nothing succeeds like failure

Who can ask for a better way to make a living than one in which repeated failure only improves your reputation? That's the world of Washington “experts” and pundits, today's example being one Michael O'Hanlon, who, in today's Times shares his expertise once again, explaining why the U.S. government should ignore Hamid Karzai's threats and continue with its plans to remain mired in Afghanistan.

You may remember Mr. O'Hanlon from the early years of the Iraq War, when he was one of those hawkish “liberals” that cheered on the Bush lie machine. In O'Hanlon's case, he then spent several years claiming that he did not say all those things he said, and take all those positions he took.

Well, O'Hanlon need hardly worry whether the Obama Administration will take his advice. Whether it calls Karzai's bluff or not, it will stay in Afghanistan. It would be nice if it would tell Mr. Karzai, who is surely, in actuality, frightened to death that the U.S. might leave (who would prop him up if we left?), that it totally respects his position and will leave, lock, stock and barrel as soon as it can. Give the Russians credit: they got completely out. We, on the other hand, prefer to remain enmeshed in an area that has been the death of Empires since the beginning of written history. It will all come to no good, as it always does, but what of that. No doubt a few years from now Mr. O'Hanlon will be telling us that he knew all along that we should get out.

As Paul Krugman has pointed out repeatedly lately, everyone makes mistakes and everyone gets it wrong sometimes. Problems arise when one refuses to admit one's mistakes; either by ignoring them, or by insisting, as did Mr. O'Hanlon, that one never made those mistakes in the first place. We learn from our mistakes only when we accept that they are mistakes.

But as we see in today's paper, it really doesn't pay for pundits to admit error. Chances are if O'Hanlon had done so, he'd never have gotten the chance to bloviate in today's Times. Nothing succeeds in Washington like repeated failure, so long as you never admit a mistake.

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