Paul Johnson sets it all out right here, "Why Millions Say, Softly, God Bless America." He's definitely on to something when he writes,

The intellectuals wanted the Iraqi elections to be defeated by terror. But now that the elections have actually taken place, they want the new government to fail. They want democracy to fail in Afghanistan as well so that they can smile smugly and say, "We told you so." For if democracy were to triumph everywhere, what role would there be for the intellectual critic? As Shakespeare put it, "Othello's occupation's gone."

Of course, intellectual critics will always find something to criticize -- even if doing so makes one a charlatan and a fraud, a la Ward Churchill. But one does sense that many of the self-proclaimed "intellectuals" have the same stake in seeing our Iraq mission fail as Jesse Jackson does in insisting that there is never any progress in race relations.