Department of Nuclear-Strength Irony

In most lines of work, a person does his credibility real damage by denying the obvious and asserting the manifestly untrue.

-- David Frum, June 29, 2008

The gloomsayers... have been proven wrong when they predicted the United States would sink into a forlorn quagmire in Iraq... Like General Barry McCaffrey, they predicted a military disaster in which the United States could potentially suffer, 'bluntly, a couple to 3,000 casualties.'

-- David Frum (with Richard Perle), An End to Evil, 2003

George W. Bush was hardly the obvious man for the job. But by a very strange fate, he turned out to be, of all unlikely things, the right man.

-- David Frum, The Right Man: the Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush

[O]rder was restored to Afghanistan. For all the questions about whether the United States has done enough to stabilize Afghanistan, there's no doubt at all that the world's wildest country has become freer and safer than ever before, and that it has ceased to be a base of operations for al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists.
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-- David Frum, December 28, 2002

The United States and its allies are now ready to strike at Saddam Hussein... My prediction is that the war will go with blinding speed.

-- David Frum, Ibid.

If the preparations for the Iraq round of the war on terror have gone very, very slowly, the Iraq fight itself is probably going to go very, very fast. The shooting should be over within just a very few days from when it starts. The sooner the fighting begins in Iraq, the nearer we are to its imminent end.

-- David Frum, February 24, 2003

Fortunately, it now seems overwhelmingly probable that the US will succeed in Iraq and that Bush will be re-elected; that the Iraqis will gain their freedom and the Palestinians will get their state.

-- David Frum, November 23, 2003 (Maybe 1 out of 4 ain't bad?)

But perhaps, if I quote the context for the first quote above, it will explain something:

In most lines of work, a person does his credibility real damage by denying the obvious and asserting the manifestly untrue. Yet in the book world, there can be very large rewards for a writer who boldly turns reality on its head. (emphasis added)

Ah, that all makes sense now.