{"id":12518,"date":"2007-08-12T19:38:57","date_gmt":"2007-08-12T23:38:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/12518.html"},"modified":"2007-08-12T19:38:57","modified_gmt":"2007-08-12T23:38:57","slug":"ohanlon-comes-clean-with-greenwald","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/ohanlon-comes-clean-with-greenwald\/","title":{"rendered":"O’Hanlon comes clean with Greenwald"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon caused quite a stir a couple of weeks ago with an NYT<\/i> op-ed<\/a>, co-written with Ken Pollack, on U.S. “progress” in Iraq. The piece immediately became The Most Important Opinion Piece Ever, at least as far as Bush and his supporters are concerned.<\/p>\n

The two, who recently returned from an eight-day visit to Iraq, argued that U.S. forces are “finally getting somewhere in Iraq.” O’Hanlon and Pollack added that they were “surprised by the gains” they saw, and now believe there’s a potential for “sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.”<\/p>\n

The White House, GOP presidential candidates, and the rest of the GOP establishment embraced the op-ed as gospel — and proof that any talk about troop withdrawal is premature. After all, the right said, O’Hanlon and Pollack work for the “liberal” Brookings Institution, and are “critics<\/a>” of the war, at least as far as the media was concerned.<\/p>\n

Within a few days of the NYT<\/i> op-ed being published, the two started backpedaling just a bit<\/a>, conceding the lack of political progress in Iraq, which was, of course, the original point of the surge. O’Hanlon shed additional light on his perspective in a fascinating interview<\/a> with Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, which was published today.<\/p>\n

The whole thing is worth reading, but Glenn emphasized a point that was omitted in the original Times<\/i> piece, and went largely unmentioned in the ensuing coverage: O’Hanlon’s and Pollack’s perspective was shaped in large part by what the Pentagon allowed them to see.<\/p>\n

GG: The first line of your Op-Ed said: “viewed from Iraq where we just spent the last eight days interviewing American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel…” How did you arrange the meetings with the Iraqi military and civilian personnel?<\/p>\n

MO: Well, a number of those — and most of those were arranged by the U.S. military. So I’ll be transparent about that as well. These were to some extent contacts of Ken and Tony, but that was a lesser number of people. The predominant majority were people who we came into contact with through the itinerary the D.O.D. developed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

O’Hanlon was also fairly forthcoming about his support for the war.
\n
\nAs Glenn explained:<\/p>\n

O’Hanlon was, from the beginning, a boisterous supporter of the invasion of Iraq. While he debated what the optimal war strategy was, once it became clear exactly what strategy Bush would use, O’Hanlon believed — and forcefully argued — that George Bush was doing the right thing by invading Iraq: “As you rightly reported — I was not a critic of this war. In the final analysis, I was a supporter.”<\/p>\n

He believed with virtual certainty that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD and that that fact constituted the principal justification for the invasion. In February, 2003, O’Hanlon wrote — in a column entitled “Time for War” — that the “president was still convincing on his central point that the time for war is near” and decreed that “it is now time for multilateralists to support the president.” Not a single one of the television interviews Pollack and O’Hanlon gave about their Op-Ed included any reference to the fact that they were both supporters of the war and of the Surge.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s a very<\/i> informative interview. Be sure to take a look<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon caused quite a stir a couple of weeks ago with an NYT op-ed, co-written with Ken Pollack, on U.S. “progress” in Iraq. The piece immediately became The Most Important Opinion Piece Ever, at least as far as Bush and his supporters are concerned. The two, who recently returned from an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}