Is it better late than never? Can journalists really be forgiven for getting it so wrong, for so long? Color me jaded, but for some, I don't think so.

Indeed, just last night, after reading this post a reader informed me that Ricks should be forgiven becasue he'd had a "battlefield conversion."

When?

Was it after he wrote this? Or this? Or maybe this?

Perhaps Ricks had his 'battlefield conversion,'like most others, when it was so blindingly obvious (when he or his editors had political cover?) that Iraq was falling apart that only a fool, or Donald Rumsfeld, couldn't see? If so (and I'm fairly convinced that's the case here) I'm not persuaded Ricks is really being honest with his readers. Then again, maybe he's just trying to cash in on Operation Dry Hole like everyone else. (Unlike Nir Rosen who actually had the balls to report on the insurgents, as opposed to Lt. Col. PR.)

More after the jump.

Even so, I have to admit, this Michael Hirsh essay about Ricks' story and Bush misunderestimating his enemies is surprisingly well written and coherent. In it Hirsh articulates, without too much CW, how the entire neocon agenda has been conflated with the 'War On Terror:'

[After 9/11] inexorably, month by month, the Bush administration broadened the war on terror to include ever more peoples and countries, especially Saddam's Iraq, relying on thinner and thinner evidence to do so. And what began as a hunt for a relatively contained group of self-declared murderers like bin Laden became a feckless dragnet of tens of thousands of hapless Arab victims . . . the vast majority of whom had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or terror, just as Saddam had little to do with Al Qaeda, just as the Iraqi insurgency had little to do with Al Qaeda (at least at the start), just as Hizbullah has nothing to do with Al Qaeda. And as the war broadened beyond reason, and the world questioned the legitimacy of the enterprise, our friends dropped away. Worse, we have found ourselves making enemies in the Islamic world faster than we could round them up or kill them.

That's really it in a nutshell, no?

Look, again, I'm glad to see Hirsh calling it like it is, but dammit, where was he two years ago? Well, he tells us:

At one point we burst into a small hotel, or hostel, whose guests were said to be Iranian-influenced insurgent sympathizers. Finding none, we moved onto a house supposedly occupied by the Iraqi hostel owner, arresting him and his three sons. One son, I remember, protested that he was a medical student, and the soldiers riffled through what were clearly English-language medical textbooks surrounding his bed. No matter, the youth was shoved to the floor. Another, by appearance the youngest, was hyperventilating and coughing incessantly, obviously feverish and ill with some respiratory ailment. On the floor he went, an American boot to his back. On the ride back to base, I sat next to one detainee in a Bradley fighting vehicle. Blood was oozing from his nose, which appeared to be broken, but he could not wipe it away because his hands were tied. He was whimpering. Many like him ended up at Abu Ghraib prison. And there, even if they weren't insurgents before—most weren't—many became supporters of the insurgency. And Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, who was a Jordanian nobody at the start of the Iraq war, used this Iraqi anger to hide himself among the population, then rode it all the way to terrorist glory.

Does Hirsh realize this through the miracle of hindsight? Or did he realize this at the time but just not tell us? Reread that question and let it sink in before proceeding. Does Hirsh realize this through the miracle of hindsight? Or did he realize this at the time but just not tell us?

If so, why should we read a journalist who sees something like this and only realizes its import two years later?

On the flipside, if he realized it then but didn't tell us what does that say?

But here's another example, just in case you're not getting my drift. I'm guessing by Hirsh's photo he's in his mid-forties, maybe a bit younger. Let's unpack this graf really quickly based on what we know of his age:

During one raid someone spotted a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian revolutionary leader, lying in a pile of paper. "Who is that?" asked Capt. Andy Depanais, a young tank commander who would have been in grade school at the time of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

Again, one would assume Hirsh knows who Khomeini is, right? And that Hirsh would know the difference between a Shi'a and a Sunni, or at least recognize that what the soldiers were doing that night had ramifications beyond anything he could really imagine, right? (Furthermore, I was in grade-school when Khomeini took over and I know who he is. Why infantalize the Captain? After all, he too should know this. But I digress.)

So, why write about it now and not then? Two years ago this would have been an absolutely damning indictment of our war fighting strategy. And yet Hirsh wrote nothing. (I'm getting angrier as I type.)

I could go on and on with examples like this all day night but I won't. I'll leave you with this gutwrenching graf:

[A]t cafes and around kitchen tables throughout the Arab world, good-hearted Muslims can no longer defend America against their more hate-filled brethren. They have fallen silent; they have no arguments left. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," as the poet Yeats memorably put it.

This absolutely breaks my heart. You want to know why? Because a fellow Agonista is one of those moderate, well-educated, thoughtful Muslims who wanted to support America, who did support America.

Most of the blame is with Bush, Cheney and Rummy. But Michael Hirsh, I blame you too. You didn't level with us when you could, and so it's partly your fault too.