The Facts About O’Hanlon's and Pollack's Column

I am glad to see the facts about these two men being widely disseminated. Thank you, Mr. Lyons.



Hardly anybody with a TV set can have missed the good news: President Bush’s surge is working ! Success may be at hand. So said Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack, who described themselves as “two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq,” in a New York Times op-ed column and in subsequent visits to almost every radio and TV studio in Washington.

After interviewing American soldiers and Iraqi officials, they pronounced themselves “surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily ‘victory’ but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.” They urged that politics be put aside and the surge continue at least through 2008.

That got Salon’s Glenn Greenwald going. Where and when, he wondered, had these two jokers ever harshly criticized Iraq policy ? Pollack has been a prominent Iraq war hawk from the start. It’s fair to say he’s staked his career on it. His nowdiscredited 2002 book, “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.” convinced many wavering Democrats, converting “more doves into hawks than Richard Perle, Laurie Mylroie and George W. Bush combined,” as Slate’s Chris Suellentrop wrote.

Greenwald also produced a documented list of bellicose quotes demonstrating that O’Hanlon, too, was, “from the beginning, a boisterous supporter of the invasion of Iraq.” In an interview with Greenwald that he foolishly agreed to, O’Hanlon was forced to concede that “[a ] s you rightly reported, I was not a critic of this war. In the final analysis, I was a supporter.”

Indeed, both men have been vociferous—if little-known outside the Beltway—advocates of “The Surge” since before it began.

- rest at http://moose-and-squirrel.com/gene/gene.html

 

We need to keep in mind that this was not a news article in the New York Times. It was an opinion column written by these two men.

Bro. Curtis, you are correct. I could have titled the thread better.

 

My libertarian friend who hosts the local talk radio show on weekday mornings had not been reading Lyons' columns because Lyons is such a liberal but I told him about how good his columns on foreign policy have been the past couple of weeks and he read this column on the air on Wednesday morning.