LOOKING BACK. In fall 2006, the United States turned on the NeoCommentators. Their smug, wrongheaded chatter had helped lead the country into a catastrophic war and then, without missing a beat, turned to condemn those who sought to end it. Infuriated, readers nationwide began agitating for their removal from op-ed pages, magazine columns, and television roundtables. And so began the Pundit Purge of '07 -- the first time in recent history that the predictive failure of an ideology led to actual occupational consequences for its peddlers. Historians differ on what, precisely, sparked the upheaval, but no small number point to a December 10th column by David Brooks, which pretended to peer back at America's foolish withdrawal from Iraq from some point far in the future, when it was well understood that the folly of exit had triggered what Brooks termed "the Second Thirty Years' War." Experts differ on what proved so infuriating about this column: Some name Brooks' total avoidance of better solutions for a disastrous conflict he'd helped create; others point to the intellectual sleight-of-hand that identified the withdrawal from Iraq, rather than the invasion of it, as the start of the disaster. And yet others believe the column's conceit was so insufferably irritating and superficial that reprisal was inevitable. What isn't in doubt is what came next: Widespread disgust, not only at Brooks, but at the entire class of pundits who had helped enable the doomed invasion, and upon its heartbreaking disintegration, miraculously and shamelessly retained their sense of moral superiority. These columns, speeches, manifestos, and appearances all followed the same structure: Acknowledgment that Iraq had deteriorated into a murderous hellhole, though with no mention of how we got there or how enthusiastically the speaker/writer had stumped for the invasion. Then would come a dark, despairing portrait of the death and chaos that would follow withdrawal, followed by insinuations or explicit assertions that the left was being naively, or even maliciously, irenic. And there would be absolutely no alternative proposals or explanations of how a different approach could calm the forces tearing the country apart -- such constructive asides would only distract from the central aim of proving the writer a higher moral being than those he was lambasting.
