Topics: Washington, D.C., Politics News
(Updated below – Update II – Update III – Update IV – Update V – Update VI)
What is the most vivid and compelling evidence of how broken our political system is? It is that the exact same people who urged us into the war in Iraq, were wrong in everything they said, and issued one false assurance after the next as the war failed, continue to be the same people held up as our Serious Iraq Experts. The exact “experts” to whom we listened in 2002 and 2003 are the same exact establishment “experts” now.
Hence, today we have yet another Op-Ed declaring that We Really Are Winning in Iraq This Time — this one in the NYT from “liberal” Brookings Institution “scholars” Ken Pollack and Mike O’Hanlon. They accuse war critics of being “unaware of the significant changes taking place,” proclaim that “we are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms,” and the piece is entitled “A War we Might Just Win.”
The Op-Ed is an exercise in rank deceit from the start. To lavish themselves with credibility — as though they are war skeptics whom you can trust — they identify themselves at the beginning “as two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq.” In reality, they were not only among the biggest cheerleaders for the war, but repeatedly praised the Pentagon’s strategy in Iraq and continuously assured Americans things were going well. They are among the primary authors and principal deceivers responsible for this disaster. 
Worse, they announce that “the Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility,” as though they have not. But let us look at Michael O’Hanlon, and review just a fraction of the endless string of false and misleading statements he made about Iraq and ask why anyone would possibly listen to him about anything, let alone consider him an “expert” of any kind:
First, this is not the first time O’Hanlon took a trip to Iraq (for what Sen. Webb recently called the “dog and pony show”) and then came back and announced How Great Things Are, that We Have the Right Strategy, and that We are Winning. From an NPR Interview, September 28, 2003:
LIANE HANSEN: Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution. He just returned from a Pentagon-sponsored visit to Iraq and he’s in the studio. Welcome back, Michael. What’s it like in Iraq?MICHAEL O’HANLON: Well, it’s obviously tough. It’s a little better, however, than I thought for a couple of reasons. One is I think the counterinsurgency effort is going fairly well. Now obviously, you mention the number of attacks per day that continue; it’s a real concern. We’re still losing troops. Everyone’s aware of that. The truck bombings in August were tragic. The assassination of the Governing Council member was tragic, but overall, the counterinsurgency mission seems to be going well in that we are taking out a lot more people than we’re losing and I believe we’re using force fairly selectively and carefully on balance.
There’s some mistakes here and there. Also, security is pretty good in most of the country despite the fact that it’s not good everywhere and that we certainly hear the reports of violence on a daily basis.
HANSEN: You say it was better than you thought. What were the surprises? Were there any?
O’HANLON: I would say that the main surprise for me was probably that one could travel around the country, even flying over contested areas, with relatively confident sense of security. There wasn’t as much need to avoid certain areas as I might have expected.
There is obviously violence. There was violence in some of the regions that we visited on the days we were there. But you’re talking about specific, isolated acts just like you would get in an American city. I’m not trying to say that this is a country at peace, but overall, we really do run most of the country together with our Iraqi partners and the resistance forces are very small pockets who operate only at a given moment here or there. . . .
HANSEN: The Defense Department this past week announced the mobilization of 10,000 soldiers from the Army National Guard. The Bush administration has been trying to get countriesb
O’HANLON: My impression is it’s roughly sufficient. I would probably go a little higher. But the bigger problem is just sustaining that number is going to be very hard, and that’s the reason we have to call up more National Guardsmen.
And, just incidentally, despite heralding his Recent Trip to Iraq, as though that demonstrates he really knows what is going on “on the ground,” this is what it consists of:
HANSEN: Final question. Your visit was sponsored by the Defense Department. Are you concerned that you perhaps were given a rather narrow view of the country by your hosts?O’HANLON: There’s no doubt. But we only had a couple days there. We talked primarily to American officials. However, we could be quite prying and we could really push them. And I think overall, nonetheless, I was reassured. We didn’t meet a lot of Iraqis who could tell us how things were going, but on balance, I think we had some access.
At roughly the same time, he wrote a report about his field trip to Iraq and decreed:
But the Iraqis we met were nonetheless grateful for the defeat of Saddam and passionate about their country’s future. Their enthusiasm, and their desire to work together with U.S. and other coalition forces, warmed the heart of this former Peace Corps volunteer. Maybe that is why, on balance, I couldn’t help but leave the country with a real, if guarded and cautious, feeling of optimism.Also in September, 2003, O’Hanlon published another progress report which revealed all the happy news in Iraq:
How can we really determine if the Iraq mission is going well? . . . To convince a skeptical public about progress in Iraq, the Bush administration would do well to provide more systematic information on all of these and other measurable metrics routinely — even when certain trends do not support the story it wants to sell.The administration should want to do this, because on balance the Iraq mission is going fairly well . . . But most indicators are now favorable in Iraq . . . .
As for Baathist remnants of Saddam’s regime, they are diminishing with time as coalition forces detain and arrest them. For example, in the region north of Baghdad now run by General Ray Odierno’s 4th infantry division, some 600 fighters have been killed and 2,500 arrested over recent months.. . . .
Around Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, and other parts of the northern “Sunni triangle,” for example, former regime loyalists have been sufficiently weakened that they need reinforcements from other parts of Iraq to continue many of their efforts. Most Baathists from the famous “deck of cards” are now off the street; many second tier loyalists of the former regime are also being arrested or killed on a daily basis. . . .
In these counterinsurgency operations, American troops are following much better practices than they did in Vietnam . . . . Coalition forces and other parties were slow at times to anticipate such tactics, resulting in excessive vulnerability to the kinds of truck bombings witnessed in August and the kinds of assassination attempts that just took the life of a member of the Governing Council, Akila al-Hashimi. But these mistakes are being corrected, and future such attacks are unlikely to be as devastating.
That sure is a real harsh critic of Bush’s war management there. While virtually all of these “liberal hawk” war proponents try to salvage their own reputations by pretending that their Glrious War was ruined by Bush’s “terrible mismanagement,” that is not what O’Hanlon was saying back then. In fact, O’Hanlon testified (.pdf) before the House Armed Services Committee in October of 2003 and titled his report “A Relatively Promising Counterinsurgency War: Assessing Progress in Iraq.” After acknowledging a few “mistakes” — the Mission Accomplished Speech and Cheney’s excessively “rosy” language — he proclaimed:
In my judgment the administration is basically correct that the overall effort in Iraq is succeeding. By the standards of counterinsurgency warfare, most factors, though admittedly not all, appear to be working to our advantage. While one would be mistaken to assume rapid or easy victory, Mr. Rumsfeld’s leaked memo last week probably had it about right when he described the war as a “long, hard slog” that we are nonetheless quite likely to win. . . .That said, on the prognosis of Iraq’s future, the Bush administration is at least partly and perhaps even mostly right. Negative headlines need to be quickly countered with good news, of which there is an abundance. . . Most of Iraq is now generally stable . . . . [T]he state of affairs in Iraq and recent trends in that country do not look so disconcerting. Things are getting gradually better even as we progress towards an exit strategy that could further diffuse extremist sentiment.
On April 9, 2003, he published a piece for the Brookings Daily War Report entitled “Was the Strategy Brilliant?” — in which he struggled with the deeply Serious question of whether Don Rumsfeld’s strategy was unprecedentedly brilliant or merely mind-blowingly smart:
Two weeks ago, when the U.S.-led campaign against Saddam Hussein’s regime seemed to be bogging down, Secretary Rumsfeld defended the coalition’s war strategy. Though keeping some distance from it himself, describing it as General Frank’s plan rather than his own, he described it as excellent. General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went one step further, calling the overall concept “brilliant.” Others who had seen it admired its simplicity and its flexibility.Three weeks into the war, with the conflict’s outcome increasingly clear, it is a good time to ask if General Myers was right. Will war colleges around the world be teaching the basic coalition strategy to their students decades from now, or will the conflict be seen as a case in which overwhelming military capability prevailed over a mediocre army from a mid-sized developing country?
On balance, this victory will be primarily due to the men and women and technology of today’s U.S. and U.K. armed forces. Our military is so good that it probably could win this war even with a poor strategyb
That said, there have been major elements of military creativity in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Whether the overall concept deserves to be called brilliant is debatable. But it does appear to have been clever in several specific ways, most notably in the special operations campaign of the war’s early days and in the recent battles for Basra, Baghdad, and other cities. . . .
None of this is to claim that the war is over just yet. And of course, victory is coming at a significant human cost; largely for that reason, the broader strategic benefits of this war may be less clear-cut than the battlefield successes. But military historians are already getting ready to put pen to paper, especially to discuss the role of coalition special forces as well as the coalition’s urban-warfare techniques. On balance, Secretary Rumsfeld’s description of the overall war plan may be more judicious than General Myers. But it has indeed been a very good plan.
On April 30, 2003, O’Hanlon went to The Baltimore Sun and wrote gleefully about how Dick Cheney could mock the ex-general war critics because Cheney had been so vindicated:
Much of the controversy centered on whether the Army was perhaps a division or division and a half short of the force that it should have had. In my judgment, it was a bit short — but the problem never threatened the basic integrity of the war plan.
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