For someone who couldn’t stop advertising his post-invasion humility, Andrew Sullivan sure got over any trepidation about sweeping pronouncements. This is from his endorsement of Ron Paul yesterday:

Let’s be clear: we have lost this war. We have lost because the initial, central goals of the invasion have all failed: we have not secured WMD’s from terrorists because those WMD’s did not exist. We have not stymied Islamist terror—at best we have finally stymied some of the terror we helped create. We have not constructed a democratic model for the Middle East—we have instead destroyed a totalitarian government and a phony country, only to create a permanently unstable, fractious, chaotic failed state, where the mere avoidance of genocide is a cause for celebration. We have, moreover, helped solder a new truth in the Arab mind: that democracy means chaos, anarchy, mass-murder, national disintegration and sectarian warfare. And we have also empowered the Iranian regime and made a wider Sunni-Shiite regional war more likely than it was in 2003. Apart from that, Mr. Bush, how did you enjoy your presidency?

There’s been almost nothing but good news out of Iraq for about six months. Moreover, coalition forces have just ceded control of Basra, the eighth and so far most critical province to do so, to Iraqi security forces. The banner atop Andrew Sullivan’s blog displays the George Orwell quote “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Sullivan has courted the fringe for a long time now; that he’s embraced it by endorsing Ron Paul isn’t so remarkable, though his total helplessness in this Orwellian struggle is.