O’Hanlon Fires Back
After publishing his opinion piece about the situation in Iraq, which he authored with Ken Pollack, Michael O'Hanlon was exposed to the full fury of the unhinged left. The slurs flew fast and furious and much smearing was attempted. Today, O'Hanlon fires back - hard - at the critics.
How can one gather and assess information about Iraq — collected on a trip or from any other source? Information from a war zone is difficult to attain and interpretation is open to many views.
Unfortunately, much of the blogosphere and other media outlets have emphasized the wrong question, challenging the integrity of anyone who dares to express politically incorrect views about Iraq. Last week, Jonathan Finer criticized on this page [" Green Zone Blinders," Aug. 18] a New York Times essay that Ken Pollack and I wrote, as well as the comments of several senators, for claiming too much insight based on short trips to Iraq. Finer suggested that we did not leave the Green Zone, although we frequently did, on this and other trips, and he ignored how critical Pollack and I have been of administration policy in the past.
Worse, Finer and critics such as Rep. Jack Murtha and Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald have suggested that our analyses are based on a few days of military "dog-and-pony shows." Our assessments are based on our observations as well as on years of study. That experience creates networks of colleagues such as military officers whose off-the-record insights can inform ours and who in the past have often told us when they did not think their strategies were working or could work. While hardly making us infallible, this also led each of us to oppose predictions of a "cakewalk" before the invasion and to join Gen. Eric Shinseki in criticizing invasion plans that had too few troops and too little thought given to the post-invasion mission.
Read it all. He lays out what they based their opinions on and how they obtained the information. Not that any of that will stop a fresh round of unhinged attacks. But the fact is that even Democratic politicians who opposed the war from the start are seeing real progress and counseling against withdrawal. So let the unhinged ones destroy their own credibility by trying to destroy others.
By Jack, Saturday, 25 August , 2007 @ 10:25 am
There are few hinged people in this debate. For years the unhinged right have claimed that things were going swimmingly in Iraq. Sadly, there were wrong. Even President Bush, in late 2006-early 2007, told the Washington Post that “we’re not winning, we’re not losing,” which was a complete flip-flop from his pre-election statement of “absolutely, we’re winning.” No doubt many on the left will not believe anything positive out of Iraq, but the propensity to deny the truth is something both extremes do.
By Jose, Saturday, 25 August , 2007 @ 11:47 am
While I am not a military expert, nor have I ever been to Iraq, I believe that one sure sign that things are going well in Iraq is the recent visit of the French foreign minister to that country. This is because I have paid attention to French foreign policy over the past decades. During the Cold War they pulled out of NATO and then rejoined it AFTER the collapse of the Soviet Union. So I believe that they are just repeating their “pull out” when things are hot and come back in to “join with the winners”.