Am I hallucinating?

Today in the WaPo there's a story about how many of the people who are currently critical of the war are engaging in the hindsight bias.

Hindsight bias is the tendency to say "I knew it all along" when talking about some current unfortunate event (mostly; it can sometimes operate for good things, too).

Excuse me, but holy crap: the article looks like an excuse to write a little bit about some psychology (which is something that I think should happen in more newspapers), but it's doing it by minimizing the fact that thousands of people predicted a disaster.

Follow me over the edge for a little more discussion, and a request for help.

From the story:

Antiwar liberals last week got to savor the four most satisfying words in the English language: "I told you so."

This was after a declassified National Intelligence Estimate asserted that the war in Iraq was creating more terrorists than it was eliminating. For millions of people who opposed President Bush's mission in Iraq from the start, this was proof positive that they had been right all along. Yes, they told themselves, we saw this disaster coming.

Only . . . that isn't quite true.

One of the most systematic errors in human perception is what psychologists call hindsight bias -- the feeling, after an event happens, that we knew all along it was going to happen. Across a wide spectrum of issues, from politics to the vagaries of the stock market, experiments show that once people know something, they readily believe they knew it all along.

Well, now, perhaps I'm crazy and I only imagine that people like Peter Galbraith and others were forecasting that Iraq was going to explode, and then fall apart, and just in general be a huge mess once we'd removed the "strongman" form of government that had held it together since its conception.

What I would like to do is write the WaPo and tell them that, no, in fact, we are not engaging in the hindsight bias -- or more appropriately, many of us are not.  There have been liberals who have been screaming about this since its inception, and said over and over and over that this was going to be a clusterfuck of collosal proportion.

But I have two labs and an exam to prepare for tomorrow, so I thought I would call on the shared wisdom of the Kos-mos, and see if I can get you to point me to links where people, before the war, predicted a disaster.

It could be that I'm wrong, and the WaPo is right, and we are all just misremembering what happened.  But I do not think so.  I think the newspaper is trying to minimize a justified criticism of the very idea of this stupid war.

Can you give a feller a hand?  Can you think of places for me to cite in my sharp and witty retort to the WaPo?

Or maybe we can just gang up on the WaPo blog and show them the liberals who predicted -- on film or in print -- that this was going to be a disaster.

Let's push this son of a bitch back.