Belgravia fulminates

The neocons are really twitching right about now, what with Al Qaeda's annual bombings in the West continuing apace despite the regime change in Iraq.

One sign of the cognitive dissonance is the tendency toward revisionism, on display for example at Belgravia Dispatch. Money:

Look, it is beyond doubt that the Iraq war has made jihadist recruitment easier than before it. But this is a long term conflict, and those advocates of the war always realized that there could well be a short to mid-term uptick in jihadist activity given the destabilization and emotions that would inevitably be triggered by the Iraq war. The goal was and is to slog it out and see emerge a viable, unitary democratic polity in Iraq that would serve as an example to the Arab world of how a complex, multi-sectarian country can enshrine minority rights, the rule of law, and other tenets of political liberalism so as to help pull the region towards modernity. This, in turn, could well lead towards a long-term diminishment in radical Islamist activity.

This is balderdash for two reasons. First of all, "advocates of the war always realized" what? To repeat: what?

Second, more pertinently, this is awfully convenient reasoning: allowing the fact that things are getting worse to be merely a prelude to things getting better in the future. The French refer to this sort of logic as reculer pour mieux sauter -- to take a few steps back so as to getting a running start on a long jump. How far is this from the Chamberlinite demand that we must accept breaking eggs in order to make omlettes?