For three years, antiwar and press accounts of the alienating effects of the Iraq occupation have been mostly ignored or derided in domestic political debate. Emphasis on arbitrary detentions and killings were apt to elicit angry charges of anti-Americanism or of wild-eyed exaggeration. Documented U.S. misbehavior, such as at Abu Ghraib prison, was regarded as the work of bad apples being brought to account. Analyses of the prospects of U.S. policy mostly spurned exploration of the humiliations facing Iraqis under military occupation, instead heavily emphasizing military factors and Iraqi political events -- defeating the insurgency, drafting a constitution, electing a permanent government.

Both the counterinsurgency and the democratization themes have since been quietly abandoned as potential turning points as military campaign after military campaign and election after election has not lastingly quelled violence or brought forth a functioning economy. It has become commonplace even among hawks to note that there can be no merely military solution to the problems facing the country, that Iraqi politics must play a major healing role by drawing a wide swath of citizens into a unity government. But the absurd specter of a Zarqawi takeover has remained a respectable argument in warnings against U.S. withdrawal, in apparent efforts to maintain the largely military orientation of our policy, and the damage and unpopularity of our occupation have been acknowledged with comparative rarity.

But the heavy hand style of occupation has a new foe: the new Army commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who can scarcely be dismissed as an exemplar of leftist hostility or defeatism. Buried casually on the inside pages of today's New York Times, an article by David S. Cloud contains passages describing Gen. Chiarelli's Bush administration-approved strategy that bear an uncanny resemblance to long-standing antiwar talking points critiquing U.S. policy in Iraq. "'Every time we shoot at an Iraqi in this culture — a culture of revenge, a culture of honor — we stand the chance of taking someone who is sitting on the fence' and pushing him toward 'the terrorists and foreign fighters,' he said." His strategy sounds notably thoughtful, emphasizing reconstruction and deemphasizing fighting the insurgency.

Though the rules governing when troops may use force have not changed, he says units are being urged to make greater use of flares and other nonviolent methods of avoiding Iraqi casualties.

The number of shootings by Americans has fallen 20 percent since January, he says. In addition, large combat operations involving mostly American troops are likely to be rare in the future, unless security disintegrates, American commanders say.

The challenge for liberals in our domestic political debate is to remind the public of cases like this one, when subsequent events or the government's own unacknowledged policy changes prove the prescience and relevance of our long-stated objections to triumphalist Bush administration policies rooted far more in ideology than in information. Recaps like this are especially crucial in the national security debate. How else can we defuse ad hominem attacks and caricatures of our commitment to national security except by explicitly articulating the complex, twisting, largely unconscious path of the conventional wisdom toward a progressive stance that so many of us held all along? We can hardly hope to earn public respect by parroting the incumbent's hawkish instincts that are increasingly being understood as counterproductive and which are easily regarded as political and disingenuous when coming from the left (does anyone remember 2004?). Nor can we hope to defuse right-wing attacks by ignoring Iraq, which will rightly be seen as cowardly and as further proof we don't take national security seriously.

In the absence of this kind of focused effort to show the public where we were coming from and specifically how we have been vindicated by reality, the mainstream media and political discourse will tend to persist in relegating us cavalierly to the margins of discussion. It's understandable, after all, that many people prefer to imagine our embarrassing dissent as an emotional, anti-intellectual fringe (as some of it certainly was) to confronting the fact that their own previous felt certainty was misplaced and complacent. Careful recapitulation of the Iraq debate, applied in a forward-looking way to our future security challenges, can help win us the fairer hearing on defense issues that the country and liberals need and deserve.

People are translating documents from Saddam's regime, unconvering all sorts of sinister plots on paper. The usual suspects at conservative opinion sites are talking up the Saddam documents, displaying little apparent skepticism. They don't mention previous misinformation eaten up by the U.S. prior to the war, such as phony documents alleging Saddam sought yellowcake, or lies from al Qaeda figure Ibn Sheikh al-Libi about explosives and chemical weapons training apparently uttered under torture, or Curveball and INC falsehoods. True, these newly released documents were internal to the Iraqi government, not designed for external consumption, but two questions are relevant here. Why don't the hawks acknowledge their previous credulity about these matters (not to mention their notions about the ease of occupation)? And as to the new documents, do the hawks really believe the Iraqi regime, founded and perpetuated on ruthless, bloody power plays, was devoted to objective, cooperative planning and record-keeping? Do they really think Baathist military and intelligence leaders were incapable of spinning a few tall tales to further various agendas and to placate others to advance their interests, or simply to survive, in the paranoid system that enveloped them all? Saddam is already thought to have lied about his WMD programs in this way, although true believers among the hawks may continue to use the new documents to spur doubt even on that if they can. To be sure, some of the scheming doubtless involved real plans, real fomenting and facilitation of terrorism, and conceivably this list included some hiding of WMD (but it will be a surprise if there were significant stockpiles).

In any event the import of such possibillities to an evaluation of the wisdom of the war is unclear. It is hardly surprising, after all, that Saddam's regime was doing some terrible things. But his was not the magnitude of threat that justified a rush to war, when inspectors were doing good work and so much work remained unfinished in Afghanistan, when the alliance of the willing was so paltry. For thinkers so devoted to exposing the pathological horror of Saddam's regime, the hawks are strangely gullible; for thinkers so devoted to seeing the big picture in a changed world and so prone to invoke the lessons of Sept. 11, the hawks are strangely focused on evidence for various plots rather than the overall strategic situation, including other international threats from al Qaeda (hardly Saddam's closest ally) and the prewar weakness of Saddam's regime. If the hawks want to talk about possibilities, let's add one to the list: As Iraq descends into chaos for the indefinite future and as the proportion of Americans who regard the war as a mistake approaches two-thirds, the hawks want desperately to change the subject from the headlines to the "news" that Saddam was a vicious tyrant and a dangerous figure, and these documents are a handy means to that end.

Sorry, guys, but we've been there and done that. I mean, people understand those basic facts about Saddam already, but insofar as they overestimated the urgency of those facts before, they are increasingly less apt to do so now. Sure, the documents should still be studied, translated, and reported on in the press. But a little perspective is in order. The war in Iraq has been a saga of dishonesty and incompetence. To look to paperwork from Saddam's regime, of all places, for vindication suggests the hawks, driven by ideological defensiveness and politics, lack a sense of absurdity, which sadly has been a major and deepening lesson for many of us watching the situation with less of an ideologically vested interest.