Every once in a while, people with strong political biases will step back and question their own beliefs.  When that happens, it rightly makes the news.

The situation in Iraq has produced a few turnarounds, the most surprising of which is former shock radio host and current talk radio host Glenn Beck.  “[Liberals] said we couldn’t force freedom on people,” Beck said yesterday. “Let me lead with my mistakes. You were right. Liberals, you were right, we shouldn’t have.”

He went on:  

“In spite of the things I felt at the time when we went into war, liberals said, ‘We shouldn’t get involved, we shouldn’t nation-build and there was no indication the people of Iraq had the will to be free. I thought that was insulting at the time. Everybody wants to be free.”  However, he admitted, “You cannot force democracy on the Iraqis or anybody else.  It doesn’t work. They don’t understand it or even really want it.”

Pat Robertson said similar things as well.  “And so to sell the American people on weapons of mass destruction, he had WMD and was getting [concentrated uranium] yellowcake out of Africa and all of that, it was a lot of nonsense,” the preacher said. “We were sold a bill of goods, we should never have gone into that country!  As bad as Saddam Hussein was, he held those warring factions in check, and he contained those radical Islamists,” he continued. “It’s too late to fix it. It’s unfixable. Those simmering animosities have been there for centuries.”  (Of course Robertson thinks the solution is just around the corner, what with the coming Rapture and everything.)

All this makes Joe Biden look like he may know what he’s talking about with foreign policy.  While he did vote for going into Iraq, he states it was because of Bush’s lies about weapons of mass destruction.  But almost as soon as we were there, Biden suggested splitting the country into three factions.  “The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group — Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab — room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests,” he wrote in a New York Times editorial in 2006.

“It is increasingly clear that President Bush does not have a strategy for victory in Iraq,” he said. “Rather, he hopes to prevent defeat and pass the problem along to his successor.”

Maybe we should be listening to Biden more often, hm?