In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Very Serious Person Michael O’Hanlon takes Barack Obama to task for his fundamental unseriousness on Iraq:

there are nonetheless two problems with Mr. Obama's Iraq views that call into doubt his ability to build a truly inclusive American political movement. First, he seems contemptuous of the motivations of those who supported the war. While showing proper respect for the heroic efforts of our troops, he displays little regard for the views of those many Americans who saw the case for war in the first place -- even as he has called for a more civil and respectful political debate.

O’Hanlon makes a good point. Truly, to bring America together, Obama will have to be more respectful of people who were wrong about war in Iraq, and who spent most of 2002-03 sneering derisively at people who turned out to be right about war in Iraq. If Obama can’t be nicer to all those people who dismissed war opponents as lunatics and Saddam-enablers, we will never have Unity in 2008.

This is unfortunate. Saddam Hussein was one of the worst and most dangerous dictators of the late 20th century. The basic proposition of unseating him was hardly an unconscionable idea, even if President Bush's approach to doing so was unilateralist, arrogant and careless. With our last image of Saddam a resigned figure heading for the gallows, it is easy to forget who this monster was.

He had used chemical weapons against his own defenseless people, as well as the armies of Iran; he violated 17 U.N. Security Council resolutions that demanded his verifiable disarmament; he had the blood of perhaps one million people on his hands; he transformed his country into what Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya famously called the "republic of fear." (Saddam's behavior didn't improve when we tried the kind of high-level diplomacy Mr. Obama favors by sending envoys like Donald Rumsfeld and April Glaspie.)

Well, like my café comrade Todd Gitlin here, I was one of those people who acknowledged that removing Saddam would be a good thing in the abstract, but only if it could be done in a way that didn’t shred international law and kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and strengthen Islamist radicals. And we didn’t trust the Bush Administration’s reports of WMD, which is why we favored inspections over invasion, and no-fly zones to protect the Kurds, and . . .

Wait a mother-loving minute, what was that last sentence again?

Saddam's behavior didn't improve when we tried the kind of high-level diplomacy Mr. Obama favors by sending envoys like Donald Rumsfeld and April Glaspie.

OK, this has to be some kind of joke, right? Please tell me – you know I’m not very good with "irony." Because this looks to me like “Saddam’s behavior didn’t improve when we took Iraq off the list of terrorism-sponsoring nations and sold him a bunch of chemical and biological weapons, and it also didn’t improve when we told him, 'we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.'” Seriously, folks, there’s no way O’Hanlon can be suggesting that Saddam was a monster despite the efforts of Rumsfeld and Glaspie to restrain him. Because that would just be silly.

Yet Mr. Obama consistently accuses those who supported the war of political motivations -- and unsavory ones at that. On Dec. 27, for example, Mr. Obama said in Des Moines, Iowa, "You can't fall in line behind the conventional thinking on issues as profound as war and then offer yourself as the leader who is best prepared to chart a new and better course for America."

Whew. Here O’Hanlon is on solid ground again: it really is irresponsible of Obama to accuse war supporters of unsavory political motivations like this. Falling in line behind the conventional thinking . . . when will the slurs and low blows end? It’s time to draw a line in the sand. Because if we let Democratic leaders accuse each other of “falling in line behind the conventional thinking” today, surely they’ll be accusing each other of “relying on polls” and “telling people what they want to hear” next. And then you can say so long to civility.

And now to the conclusion:

Politically, Republicans will surely try to paint any policy of rapid, complete withdrawal as Democratic defeatism. Mr. Obama needs to think hard about whether his uplifting message of hope is really bulletproof enough to withstand these charges -- and about whether his Iraq views truly reflect the non-ideological, nonpartisan wisdom of the American people that he seeks to lead.

Leaving aside the fact that Republicans will speak of “Democratic defeatism” even if the Democratic nominee promises to hunt terrorists down and rip them limb from limb with his (or her!) bare hands, this is just lazy op-edding on O’Hanlon’s part. When you invoke the “non-ideological, nonpartisan wisdom of the American people,” you are supposed to quote one of them who happens to agree with you, preferably a cab driver or a waitress or a self-employed carpenter. They are supposed to say, as they take you to the airport or pour you a second cup of coffee or heft a hammer or something, “I want to like Obama, but I don’t know -- he just doesn’t seem to respect the people who supported the war. I don’t see how he can bring us together if he doesn’t reflect the non-ideological, nonpartisan common sense that makes America great.”

Let me demonstrate. The other day, plumbers came to repair the sewage line in my house, and one of them said, as he was draining the slop sink, “You’ve got a backup here because of the tree roots -- and you know, I just can’t figure out that Michael O’Hanlon fellow. He seems nice enough, but he just doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

There, that's how it's done.