No I-Told-You-Sos

Instead, she looks like an accurate prognosticator. But, "you can't take any pleasure in having been right," says Matthews, "because this is a catastrophe for the United States and people are dying and didn't have to die, and it's going to take us years and years and years to dig out of this, and it's been a catastrophe for the Iraqi people."

Also repudiated were people who supported the war but diverged from the official administration line. Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, then the Army's chief of staff, was sharply rebuffed in early 2003 for publicly saying that several hundred thousand U.S. troops would be needed to keep the peace in Baghdad.

Now, as President Bush seeks additional troops for Iraq, it is widely agreed that the war was indeed prosecuted with too few troops -- a seeming vindication for Shinseki, though he did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Vindication is a difficult and complex concept and one that has to be considered with many caveats, such as those presented by Zbigniew Brzezinski when asked if he felt vindicated.

"If vindication was accompanied by a sense that America is likely to undo the damage they have done and can dis-embarrass itself of the tragic involvement, then my answer would be yes."

But Brzezinski, former national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter, scarcely believes such course corrections will happen.

He opposed Bush's doctrine of preemption and assessed the war policy as one that "was propelled forward by mendacity." He spoke out before and during the war, and he believes his criticisms began to sting as the war began to falter. As a result, he says, he was ultimately shut out of high-level Defense and State Department briefings he had often attended and was publicly upbraided by a foreign policy peer.

Despite the broad sea change in opinion among the political and policy class, Brzezinski's sense of vindication has its limits, he says, because "I have the feeling that the president's team is hellbent on digging itself in more deeply and if it does not succeed in Iraq some of its wilder policymakers seem to be eager to enlarge the scope of the war to Iran."

"I'm saddened," he said, "because I think it's doing terrible harm to America. But more than being sad, which is an emotion, I'm worried."

From Afghanistan to Iraq to Iran? Could this scenario actually play out? It is, among the vindicated, not at all absurd, for official Washington's sights have turned to Iran with "the same signs, a very similar drumbeat" as that which preceded the war in Iraq, says Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.).

Lee saw it coming -- not Iran, but Iraq. Back in September 2001, days after the terror attacks, she saw the broadly worded congressional resolution authorizing President Bush to use force to fight terrorism as giving him a dangerous degree of carte blanche.

That early resolution allowed the president to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."