Sweet vindication. Who wouldn't want it? To be right. To be free of criticism and upheld by evidence, by actual proof, that one's predictions about a controversial war were correct.

It is the culture of this town - trafficking in rightness. People clamor day in and day out, in that polished and politic way of the Washingtonian, to be proved right.

But in Iraq, the vindicated are pained. There is no gloating - not with thousands of people dead, Americans and Iraqis; not with the Iraq war precipitating an ongoing foreign policy crisis that has left the United States's global image in tatters.

For people who were pilloried, penalized or warned to be careful because of their opposition to a powerful president's war, vindication is nothing to celebrate. It is a victory most bitter.

"Emotionally, it's a very traumatic and unhappy outcome." That is retired Army Lt. Gen. William Odom, head of the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan. "How can you be happy about being right about the disaster that's been created?"

It weighs on him.

"Vindication is not pleasing," he says. "Even some of my friends have noted: The more vindicated I've been, the more irritable I become."

Back before the war even began, Odom said its aims were wrong. He criticized the doctrine of pre-emption, said al-Qaida had nothing to do with Iraq and predicted that democracy could scarcely take hold there. A year after the war began, he was quoted calling it a failure - and heard soon thereafter that he'd been dubbed a Benedict Arnold for his views. To dissent, back then, was risky. Not like now, when the conventional wisdom about the conflict has made a U-turn in a political climate where anger over the war toppled the majority party in Congress. The president sounded almost plaintive in his State of the Union address, saying, "This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we are in."

Lots of people predicted things would turn out this way. They are military brass and lawmakers and foreign policy intellectuals, the kind of wise ones whose counsel is routinely sought and respected. In the run-up to this war, their concerns carried no weight against a swelling of patriotism, a backdrop of fear and an administration determined to oust Saddam Hussein. Their warnings that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of Sept. 11 were ignored. Worse, some were shunned and scolded.

Tough questions

As president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, raised hard prewar questions about the looming Iraq engagement. They predicted Iraq would become a long occupation and recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and would damage U.S. relations with the Muslim world. And: No weapons of mass destruction would be found.

One day back then, one of Mathews's colleagues ran into an acquaintance on the street, and that acquaintance warned: " 'What is your boss doing? Nobody at Carnegie is ever going to get through another Senate confirmation.' " And Mathews was herself admonished by a colleague at another think tank, who told her: "You're going to make Carnegie irrelevant. The war's going to happen and you ought to have Carnegie working on the after-war rather than on 'we shouldn't go to war.' " Amid what she calls the "seemingly inexorable roll" toward war, the clear message was "you better get on the bandwagon or you'll never be taken seriously in this town again."

Instead, she looks like an accurate prognosticator. But "you can't take any pleasure in having been right," says Mathews, "because this is a catastrophe for the United States and people are dying and didn't have to die, and it's going to take us years and years and years to dig out of this, and it's been a catastrophe for the Iraqi people."

Also repudiated were people who supported the war but diverged from the official administration line. Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army's chief of staff, was sharply rebuffed in early 2003 for publicly saying that several hundred thousand U.S. troops would be needed to keep peace in Baghdad.

Now, as President Bush seeks additional troops for Iraq, it is widely agreed that the war was indeed prosecuted with too few troops - a seeming vindication for Shinseki, though he did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

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