On Today's Foiled Bomb Plot: Prognostication Makes Everyone Look Dumb

To the many lessons and reminders being drawn from today's stunning announcement of the arrest of persons plotting to use liquid explosives to destroy planes in flight between London and the United States, we will offer one more.

Predicting the future will make anyone look stupid.

We say this because our favorite print publication, The Atlantic Monthly, has been getting things so horribly wrong with such exquisite timing lately.

This month, James Fallows, in an informed, stimulating, nuanced and thoughtful article (link requires subscription for full access), proposes that our government declare the war on terror to have been won and so move from a war footing to a different approach to bringing an end to the Islamist threat. Among his observations that could be cited as evidence of victory is that Al Qaida has essentially been rendered powerless to take aggressive actions and that airport security exists more to reassure the public than to stop terrorists, who would never think again of hitting the hardened targets that airliners have become.

Well, so much for that.

Meanwhile, in the previous issue, Mary Anne Weaver, in an informed, stimulating, nuanced and thoughtful article (again, link requires a subscription for full access) declared that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi posed little actual threat to United States' interests and had little effective connection to Osama Bin Laden. While that issue was still on the newsstands, American forces killed al-Zarqawi, and the aftermath of reduced insurgency (as opposed to sectarian violence) and statements from Bin Laden demonstrated otherwise.

So much for that, too.

Now what's notable about all this is not that the esteemed journal got it all wrong. It's that the Atlantic's editorial position for several years has been that the Bush administration did not properly assess the threat of Iraq or plan and execute the occupation once the decision was made. In other words, Bush has been incompetent to prognosticate.

Well, now we know why he proved so incompetent and why the Atlantic was early to notice. For the former, the future is hard to know. For the latter, it takes one to know one.