There seem to be a lot of people opposed to victory in Iraq. What I say to them is, “The only people who think this wasn’t a victory are upper West Side liberals.”

Actually, I didn’t say that. Charles Krauthammer did, in April 2003. He wasn’t the only one. Virtually every neoconservative commentator in print and on TV declared the Iraq war over almost four years ago. When you go back and look at their quotations, as I do on occasion when I am in need of a laugh, you find that they got everything wrong.

Yet this has had no practical effect on their popularity. To this day, these guys still show up in print and on TV talk shows assuring us that their next policy prescription for Iraq will be the one that finally does the trick. To the degree they address their past failures at all, they argue that it was not their brilliant ideas about spreading democracy that were at fault but rather President Bush’s incompetent execution of these brilliant ideas.

But perhaps their ideas weren’t so brilliant in the first place. Let us examine a symposium held at the American Enterprise Institute in April 2003, shortly after Baghdad fell. It was at that conference, also attended by Newt Gingrich and other prominent neocons, that Krauthammer made that crack about the upper West Side liberals. It came right after a sentence in which he said, “The Arabs themselves have said that the collapse of Iraq is the greatest defeat for the Arabs since 1967.”

This nicely captures the confusion at the heart of the neocon approach. Were they trying to punish Arabs? Or liberate them?

As it happens, a British journalist put that question to the panel. He wanted to know whether these triumphant Trotskyites weren’t a bit worried that radical, anti-American parties would win the elections in Iraq.

Not a chance, said Chuck:

“We have known that there are radical Shi’a elements in Iraq who are influenced by Iran. We know that the strongest Shi’a organization is headquartered in Tehran, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and we would expect that in a vacuum, it would exert its influence, show itself early,” Krauthammer said. “But to infer that they speak for the people of Iraq is simply absurd.”

Oops. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution now runs Iraq. In fact, the head Islamic revolutionary was visiting the White House recently to thank President Bush for handing Iraq over to his party, which was founded in Iran. So was the Dawa Party, which until the neocons liberated it was busy doing things like blowing up our Kuwait embassy.

Krauthammer was also asked whether the war would cost the U.S. taxpayer much.

“At the end of the war, we will be in a position to help pay off whatever it cost because of the resources that are going to be in Iraq when we’re there,” he replied.

Oops again. So far the American taxpayer is on the hook for half a trillion or so.

But that’s just money. Wasn’t the U.S. embarking on a war in Iraq that had no clear end? Not at all.

“The war on terrorism, many people believe, is an endless war,” he said. “It is not. It is a war which is winnable. … We have succeeded in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

And so on. Not to pick on Krauthammer. Predictions from the other neocons look equally absurd in retrospect. But why would anyone assume that people who got everything wrong in the past know what to do in the future?

That is the problem with the proposed troop “surge” now being endorsed by the neocons, says Robert Baer, a retired CIA spook who was stationed in Iraq in the 1990s. Even if the surge succeeds, we’ll still be leaving Iraq to those same Iranian-leaning parties pooh-poohed in 2003 by the clueless Krauthammer.

“We’ve lost Iraq to Iran,” says Baer. Those radical Shiite politicians who came to power democratically are now signaling that the U.S. should start thinking about pulling out its troops.

“It’s like a football game where the score is 36 to 3,” says Baer. “They’re running out the clock.”

Another retired CIA agent, Larry Johnson, says the agency tried to warn the Bush administration that Iraq wasn’t going to be a “cakewalk” – as one neocon notoriously predicted.

“All you can do is point to the fact that the CIA chiefs of station were saying there was an insurgency building in the fall of 2003 and these guys were insisting there wasn’t,” he said.

Instead of admitting they were wrong, the neocons went after the CIA, says Johnson. “Both agents’ careers suffered,” he said.

But the neocons were not entirely lacking in predictive powers, says Johnson.

“They’re wonderfully reliable predictors,” he says. “Take whatever they say, and then say the exact opposite. You’ve got a good chance of being right.”