Frank Rich wrotes about Rabbi Korff, a New England Jewish leader who kissed Nixon’s arse as if it were the Queen’s white gloves. He went on record vilifying Democrats for not supporting Vietnam as un-American unpatriotic and unappreciative of a great president.
The difference between Watergate and Iraq is that the Watergate beltway insiders didn’t really believe that Nixon was truth teller. Today’s pundits are stenographers by comparison. Not only that, but most of today’s pundits are poseurs who confuse wearing a helmet with signs of progress and speaking to officials in the Mideast with actual experience.
Join Frank and me and Glen Greenwald today as we watch the early war cheerleaders fight their own battles. You know. The fact that they were actually war cheerleaders. And what does it mean to love the troops?
One particularly eloquent mea culpa can be found in today’s New York Times Magazine, where the former war supporter Michael Ignatieff acknowledges that those who "truly showed good judgment on Iraq" might have had no more information than those who got it wrong, but did not make the mistake of confusing "wishes for reality."
But those who remain dug in are having none of that. Some of them are busily lashing out Korff-style. Some are melting down. Some are rewriting history. Most seem more interested in saving their own reputations than the American troops they ritualistically invoke to bludgeon the wars’ critics and to parade their own self-congratulatory patriotism.
Now before we finish with Frank Rich, let’s put on our flak jackets and helmets and go on a helicopter ride, because when we come back, we’ll be experts. This is from Glen Greenwald at Salon.
Of course those of you with a SAVE button on your computers, may probably notice that Michael O’Hanlon, whose title is officially Fellow at the Brookings Institute is actually an Armchair General who likes to spout historical facts and figures and act as if he were an actual expert in public policy and in military dealings. His recent rosy Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal exposed him for the fake that he is.
Whenever you see an O Hanlon or a Lieberman or Michelle Malagang in a helicopter wearing flak vest and helmets, then you KNOW that these pundits, embedded in right wing blogs have come back with real ON THE GROUND experience. Read this follow up on how deep O Hanlon’s expertise went.
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... 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.
Sure, they only spoke to US Officials. But you have to give it to them. Because they spoke to US officials in Iraq that means they now have ON THE GROUND experience.
In September, 2003, O'Hanlon wrote:
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 . . . .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.
You see? To be a real expert in international conflict, you don’t need experience. You just need a big old dictionary and use a lot of words like ‘excessive vulnerability’ and ‘measurable metrics’- which is like saying ‘shrug your shoulders’ what else on your body can you shrug?
O'Hanlon testified in the House Armed Services Committee in October of 2003
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 . . . Things are getting gradually better even as we progress towards an exit strategy that could further diffuse extremist sentiment.
I mean who can argue with the judgement of an experience combat veteran like O Hanlon who SPOKE WITH A US OFFICIAL IN IRAQ? (Capitalization for emphasis-ED)
On April 9, 2003, in an essay Hanlon wrote:
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?
O'Hanlon on March 19, 2004:
At that pace, one might think the war should be won by summer. . . .Overall, the glass in Iraq is probably about three-fifths full. Considering the growing strength of Iraqi security services and the fact that $18 billion in American money (as well as a few billion more from other foreign donors) is beginning to flow into Iraq, it is likely to get somewhat fuller soon.
http://www.salon.com/...
Hard as he tries to rewrite the history of the conflict he cannot rewrite his own history. Michael O Hanlon cheered the war on. Before he was against the war, he was for it. Why is someone so wrong asked for his expertise before Congress?
Thanks for the detour- now back to Frank Rich:
It was a rewriting of history that made the blogosphere (and others) go berserk last week over an Op-Ed article in The Times, "A War We Just Might Win," by Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack. The two Brookings Institution scholars, after a government-guided tour, pointed selectively to successes on the ground in Iraq in arguing that the surge should be continued "at least into 2008."...But even more galling was the authors’ effort to elevate their credibility by describing themselves as "analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq." That’s disingenuous. For all their late-in-the-game criticisms of the administration’s incompetence, Mr. Pollack proselytized vociferously for the war before it started, including in an appearance with Oprah, and both men have helped prolong the quagmire with mistakenly optimistic sightings of progress since the days of "Mission Accomplished."
Frank Rich amazes at how the worse the war gets, the more the cheerleaders change their stories and the more they attack the critics as defeatists who hate the troops. The more they try to preserve their status as beltway expert insiders.
They don’t let you see the real carnage by pressuring networks to tone it down. Bush won’t attend the funerals because the press will be there. And they won’t even let you watch an American ritual- the military funereals, which, I might add, quite beautiful and evocative. They attack actual Marine combat veterans and other patriots like Ted Koppel for reading names of dead servicemen. I mean since when did a funeral become unpatriotic?
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University and Vietnam veteran lost his 27-year-old son was killed in Iraq.
"I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier’s life," Professor Bacevich wrote in The Washington Post. "I’ve been handed the check." The amount, he said, was "roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning."
But it was nonetheless illuminating to watch Mr. Rumsfeld and his top brass sit there under oath and repeatedly go mentally AWOL about crucial events in the case. Their convenient mass amnesia about their army’s most famous and lied-about casualty is as good a definition as any of just what "supporting the troops" means to those who even now beat the drums for this war.
Powerful words. Powerful powerful words. Yet the Bushies continue to get their agenda, the Democrats continue to posture and then fail, the media continues to move away from public opinion and the kids continue to die.
Link here.
http://select.nytimes.com/...