Bam! Pow! Zap!
 
“Holy surge Batman.” ”Right again Robin.”
 
Forgive me, I just had to throw that in, for reasons that will become apparent as you read on.
 
Anyone remember this book, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq? It was published in late 20002, just about half a year before the U.S. invaded Iraq. While the preparations for war were well advanced by then the book, by one Ken Pollack, served as an important justification for the invasion.  He argued that because all our other options had failed, the United States would ultimately have to go to war to remove Saddam before he acquired a functioning nuclear weapon.

Later, after no “weapons of mass destruction” were found, Pollack at least had the grace to apologize, sort of, for getting it wrong, or as he delicately put it in a 2004 Atlantic Monthly article, “overestimated Iraq’s WMD capabilities.”

And as long as we are strolling down memory lane does anybody recall this 2004 Washington Post article by James Steinberg and Michael O’Hanlon, in which they wrote:

Unless we restore the Iraqi people’s confidence in our role, failure is not only an option but a likelihood. Critical to achieving our goal is an announced decision to end the current military deployment by the end of next year, following the Iraqi adoption of a constitution, together with greatly intensified training for the Iraqi security forces. Otherwise, the issue may well be not how long we want to stay but how soon the Iraqis kick us out.

One might think, given Pollack’s past track record and O’Hanlon’s past sentiment that this dynamic duo would at least now see reality for what it is and not what they would like it to be. But one would be wrong. As evidence let us look at the July 30 New York Times op-ed they wrote.

Titled “A War We Just Might Win” they conclude that “there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.”

Studiously ignoring the “might” in the title their op-ed has been seized on by the administration and the usual rightwing whack jobs as justification for the surge of U.S. troops in Iraq. For example, here is Vice President Cheney on Larry King yesterday:

Q In that same interview you said that the Iraqis were well on their way to being able to defend themselves. Why not? Why aren’t they? Why aren’t we gone?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: The real test is whether or not the strategy that was put in place for this year will in fact produce the desired results.
Q Will those results be in place on that day in ’09 when you leave?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I believe so. I think we’re seeing already — from others; don’t take it from me, look at the piece that appeared yesterday in The New York Times — not exactly a friendly publication — but a piece by Mr. O’Hanlon and Mr. Pollack on the situation in Iraq. They’re just back from visiting over there. They both have been strong critics of the war, both worked in the prior administration; but now saying that they think there’s a possibility, indeed, that we could be successful.

Or as this blogger put it, “Yeah, “don’t take it from [him]“…take it from his liberal hawk friends, at least one of whom endorsed the invasion from the beginning (Ken Pollack, I’m lookin’ at you!). Please. Pollack is just Tom Friedman with a better library card.”
 
Still, great news eh? What patriotic American could argue with them?  Well, wait a minute. As long as I’m here let me take a stab at it. First, our boy blunderers were arguing, to paraphrase the Beatles, to give the surge a chance, even before the surge started. As the Center for American Progress noted yesterday:

both O’Hanlon and Pollack lent their intellectual and rhetorical support to Bush’s push for escalation in Iraq in the winter of 2006. Pollack, who was consulted by the military about escalation plans, argued at the time, “[T]he president’s plan is almost certainly the last chance to stabilize Iraq.” On Jan. 14, 2007, O’Hanlon wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post entitled A Skeptic’s Case For The Surge, arguing that though the “surge” may be “too little, way too late…for a skeptical Congress and nation, it is still the right thing to try.” O’Hanlon argued again in March 2007 that “rather than force a showdown with Mr. Bush this winter and spring, Congress should give his surge strategy a chance.”

And then there was the, well, hmm, no delicate way to put this, cherrypicking of facts by the authors. They wrote “things look much better than before.” Really, since before when? What about the at least tens of thousands Iraqi civilians who have been killed since the U.S. invasion, or the equal number maimed? What about the estimated 1.5 million “internal refugees” in Iraq, or the 1 more than million people who have fled the country since the U.S. invasion? How about the fact that in Baghdad residents are lucky to have one hour of electricity each day, and the U.S. military has built enormous concrete walls that resemble those that surround the miserable Gaza Strip, which seal off many neighborhoods from each other. Or how about the fact that unemployment in Iraq now stands at over 60 percent according to most measurements.

These omissions are especially egregious considering that O’Hanlon runs the IRAQ INDEX, which tracks reconstruction and security in post-Saddam Iraq at Brookings. And we might further note that O’Hanlon is basing his view on his gut, rather than his head, as he explained to Katie Couric on CBS Evening News on Tuesday:

For me, gut instinct, just piecing all the information together, subjectively, I thought we should give it a few more months into 2008.

But perhaps the most telling admission was this by Ken Pollack, talking to Wolf Blitzer on CNN:

Of course, Mike and I did not choose the title. We had nothing to do with it. And it’s one of the first things we should say, which is Mike and I, and, also, our colleague Tony Cordesman, who all traveled together, we came back optimistic — but very guardedly optimistic.

Cordesman has been doing military assessment and politico-military analysis for nearly forever. He has not been shy about speaking his mind over what he sees as an unfolding disaster in Iraq. One can confirm this by heading over to the Center for Strategic and International Studies website and looking up his frequently updated analyses.

If he was really “optimistic” he would have signed the op-ed along with Pollack and O’Hanlon. The fact that he didn’t speaks volumes.

And the fact that this op-ed was written by two Brookings scholars, supposedly the preeminent American liberal think tank, speaks volumes about the sad state of American liberalism.

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