Jon Chait has been a gloater extraordinaire. He atttacked Howard Dean incessantly in 2004, and when Saddam was captured, Chait gloated over Dean:

The New Republic's Jonathan Chait, conceded that on "a narrow, technical level" it was perfectly true that Hussein's capture did not make us safer. Still, he was upset. The remark, Chait wrote, "demonstrates once again Dean's incurable habit of handing Karl Rove the rope he'd use to hang Dean if nominated." Besides which, he continued, while Americans who live in America -- that's most of us! -- might not have been made safer, there are "many Americans in Iraq who are safer now that Saddam's out of his hole."

And here is the gloat of all gloats, which spoke for most of the pro-war crowd, from Hitch, on April 9, 2003:

Giving Peace a Chance

The war critics were right—not in the way they expected.
By Christopher Hitchens

Posted Wednesday, April 9, 2003, at 4:10 PM ET

So it turns out that all the slogans of the anti-war movement were right after all. And their demands were just. "No War on Iraq," they said—and there wasn't a war on Iraq. Indeed, there was barely a "war" at all. "No Blood for Oil," they cried, and the oil wealth of Iraq has been duly rescued from attempted sabotage with scarcely a drop spilled. Of the nine oil wells set ablaze by the few desperadoes who obeyed the order, only one is still burning and the rest have been capped and doused without casualties. "Stop the War" was the call. And the "war" is indeed stopping. That's not such a bad record. An earlier anti-war demand—"Give the Inspectors More Time"—was also very prescient and is also about to be fulfilled in exquisite detail.

So I'm glad to extend the hand of friendship to my former antagonists and to begin the long healing process. Perhaps one might start by meeting another of their demands and lifting the sanctions? Now the inspectors are well and truly in, there's no further need for an embargo. I noticed that Kofi Annan this week announced that the Iraqi people should be the ones to decide their own government and future. I don't mind that he never said this before: It's enough that he says it now. . . .

Chait was pretty pleased with that type of attitude then.

Now as for the lessons to be learned, Spencer Ackerman asks the right questions:

What would make Jon's case a lot clearer would be if he specified what he thinks the lessons of the Iraq war actually are. He says there are several. Sure. But if he says we should learn only some things and avoid learning others, it would be nice to know which is which. Otherwise, one fears that the thinking that led Jon into his support for the war is still alive and enslaving the mind of a really great guy.

I had a similar exchange with Peter Beinart and at tpmcafe, except Beinart does grapple with the questions:

Beinart argues that:

. . . When liberals finally got their shot at George W. Bush in 2004, it turned out that Americans did not much care which candidate could recite his six point plan for safeguarding loose nuclear material. They gravitated to the man with a vision of national greatness in a threatening world, something liberals have not had for a very long time.

Sez who Mr. Beinart? Karl Rove? Beinart's central problem is that he has married his analysis to the story of the Henry Wallace movement in the Post-World War II period and has convinced himself that it describes and explains contemporary liberal views of the United States and its role in the world. What does Henry Wallace have to do with today`s liberalism? Nothing of course. . . . Beinart wants those liberals and Democrats who disagree with them to be wild eyed useful idiots who "coddle terrorists," are crazy Leftists and haters of America. He is wrong and for obvious reasons.

Ironically, the finest chapter in the book is Beinart's discussion of the Iraq Debacle. He writes in great detail and with incisive analysis precisely why the Iraq Debacle should not have happened and how the Bush Administration has continued to bungle it to this very day. As I said, Beinart is a very smart man.

In his introduction, Bienart explains what he was thinking on Iraq:

I supported the war because I considered it the only remaining way to prevent Saddam Hussein from obtaining a nuclear bomb. I also believed it could produce a decent, pluralistic Iraqi regime, which might help open a third way to the Middle East between secular autocrats and their theocratic opponents - a third way that offered the best long-term hope for protecting the United States. On both counts I was wrong. . . . It is a grim irony that this book's central argument is one I myself ignored when it was needed most. If at times I judge others for having failed to appreciate certain aspects of the liberal spirit, I do so with keen awareness that I have not always been its most faithful custodian myself.

While it is a gracious admission by Beinart, it is also seriously flawed. Those of us who opposed the Iraq Debacle were very faithful to the liberal spirit and the liberal foreign policy. And we were in real time. And not just nobodies like me. But also folks Beinart should have listened to[. A citation to the Congressional testimony of General Wesley Clark in September 2002.]

To my way of thinking, Peter Beinart's lessons are utterly superior to Jon Chait's struggle to maintain relevance and his ego. Beinart has tried to figure out where he went wrong. That he thinks we needed those lessons is a flaw of course. But Chait has not even grappled with the questions. I don't listen to him because he does not say anything.