Which of them has conceded they were wrong?

We must not allow them to forget or be excused. Iraq was the war the Left claimed, insisted and even hoped couldn't be won.

Let us remember some of those who all but willed defeat there - and in one case expressly desired it:

Which of the countless examples should I choose? Then ABC host Terry Lane, who wrote: "I want the army of my country, which is engaged in an act of gross immorality, to be defeated"?

Or ABC host Phillip Adams, who said spreading democracy to the Middle East was "lunatic"?

Or Age columnist Ken Davidson, who agreed that "arguably . . . Iraq can only be held together by a monster"?

No, let's instead single out Sydney Morning Herald correspondent Paul McGeough as the symbol of the media's wilful failure to predict this victory in Iraq - and it's preference to report one Dunkirk after another.

I choose McGeough because so popular with his peers were his prophesies of doom that his reporting from Iraq was rewarded with a Walkley Award, a Graham Perkin Award for Journalist of the Year, and a United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Prize.

So how did this authentic voice of the Australian media regard the liberation of Iraq? Well, as an illegitimate, shameful and hopeless blunder from the very start.

At the fall of Baghdad, for instance, he fell for the beat-up of the "looting" of the Baghdad Museum and said it made him doubt after the invasion where the true "criminality lies".

He jeered at Iraq's "puppet regime", falsely accused the interim prime minister of personally executing prisoners, and predicted before the country's first true elections Iraqis were "unlikely to vote in the right numbers to legitimise this process".

When, in fact, more than eight million voted, defying terrorists' warnings to stay away, McGeough bizarrely suggested some had voted "only because of the gun at their backs".

And again and again, he tipped the civil war that never actually came.

In 2003: "Such an uprising has the potential to explode into a civil war . . ."

In 2004: "(Iraq) seems to edge steadily to civil war . . ."

In 2005: "Iraq is showing all the signs of descent into an ugly civil war."

Remember also those who so cynically tried to profit from defeatism - by preaching even more of it. Take Kevin Rudd, for example:

This war is a rolled gold disaster.

Rudd's reckless and cravenly opportunistic defeatism seems even tawdrier with time:

On the issue of Iraq itself, it stands as the greatest single error of Australian national security and foreign policy decision making since Vietnam…

Let's fact-check, and ask why Rudd is still trusted with supervision of the foreign affairs of this nation:

Australian combat deaths in Iraq:

0





Australian combat deaths in Vietnam*: 426





Mission result in Iraq: Victory.





Mission result in Vietnam: Defeat.





Status of Iraq today: Democracy.

Status of Vietnam today: Communist dictatorship.





(* - includes deaths through mines and friendly fire.)

And how about this prediction, by the Anti-Nuclear Alliance of Western Australia:

Australian soldiers will die long before and long after any harm reaches Saddam Hussein.

Saddam has been hanged, and not one Australian soldier has died in combat in Iraq. It's rare that you see a prediction so categorically falsified by events.

And thanks to the sacrifices of uniformed men and women more clear-eyed than their critics, the world is rid of a genocidal dictator, Iraq is free, and terrorists have one fewer sponsor.

(Casualty figures from iCasualites.org.)