ACCOUNTABILITY CORNER

9/11 changed many things, but it didn’t stop pundits from making predictions. How do they measure up?

--

SWATI PANDEY AND MATT WELCH

“We’ll get back to normal all too quickly.... I suspect the story will be off the evening news by Thanksgiving.”

-- Mickey Kaus, Sept. 12

“I believe that Americans will surprise the world in their willingness to fight this battle.”

-- Fareed Zakaria, Sept. 13

“The first thing no one has realized yet is that these attacks mean the end of Wilsonian idealism. Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda are all off the charts, assigned to the sepia-toned 1990s.”

-- Robert D. Kaplan, Sept. 20

“Although President Bush vows that the war ‘will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing,’ there will be no equivalent of the surrender ceremony on the deck of the battleship Missouri. This strange war will be won, but part of its strangeness is that we will not know when that has happened.”

-- George F. Will, Sept. 20

“The creation of a missile defense shield ... has now been neatly eliminated from the main agenda.”

-- Anne Applebaum, Sept. 22

“The first step [will] be the war in Afghanistan on the Taliban, not necessarily on Osama himself. I think the idea is to destroy that government and to make an example of a government that harbors him.” -- Charles Krauthammer, Sept. 22

“The president and his enforcement team correctly anticipate that the public will offer little opposition to the evisceration of its 4th Amendment rights -- and other Bill of Rights ‘guarantees’ of protection of individual liberties against the government.”

-- Nat Hentoff, Sept. 26