President Bush and his political allies are absolutely right in much of what they've been saying of late about occupations: They're fantastically complex, they take a lot of troops and a ton of time, and they require an enormous degree of discipline and patience on the part of the American people. But aren't those precisely the points that the go-slow-and-find-some-allies crowd kept trying to make during the run-up to the war? And isn't it more than a little unreasonable to ask those folks not to stand up and say, Hey, we were right -- and the happy horse manure you were getting from the administration was flat wrong today?

In fact, isn't that exactly what elections are supposed to be all about?

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