Jonah Goldberg writes about "the crippling fear of being taken seriously":

Feminists demanded that "something" be done about the Taliban's treatment of women for years. Conservatives scoffed. But when the Bush administration saw fit to liberate the women of Afghanistan — for reasons larger than merely their freedom — feminists drew circles in the floor with their open-toed shoes and grumbled about how they didn't like war. But I guarantee you if Bill Clinton had unleashed the 10th Mountain Division on Kabul to ensure reproductive choice for Afghan women, Gloria Steinem would have done cartwheels.

Amnesty International couldn't dispute the facts of the British dossier because the British dossier was, in fact, largely a reprint of information gathered by Amnesty International. So, it attacked the motives of the British government.

"There's no question that the regime has an appalling human rights record," Kamal Samari, a spokesman for Amnesty International, told the Washington Post. He admitted, for example, that the group had collected the names of as many as 170,000 Iraqis who had "disappeared." "But what we don't want to see for Iraq or any other country is that the human rights record is used selectively in order to achieve political goals."

What? . . . What!?

I could have sworn the whole reason Amnesty International existed was to make fixing human-rights problems a "political goal." When Amnesty talks of using the record "selectively," it means that the U.S. and its allies are being hypocritical by not taking a uniform line around the world on human rights. Ms. Khan complains, "Let us not forget that these same governments turned a blind eye to reports of widespread violations in Iraq before the Gulf War."

Jonah adds, "A reasonable and mature human-rights advocate would shout "Finally! You people are going to do something about Iraq! I hope you don't stop there!" She would say, "At long last, you are going to fix the problem you helped create!" She would ask, "What can we do to help?""

But instead, we get whining, because the "wrong people" (i.e. conservatives) are finally doing what liberals long thought was the right thing to do.

Or, to paraphrase Blaine Nye, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, but who gets the credit. It's very much along the lines of this, this, and this.