I did a pretty fair job yesterday of trashing Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack for their myopic New York Times op-ed on military progress in Iraq, but another journo puts the firestorm over the piece in a must-read perspective after actually interviewing one of the authors.
Money graf from a post at Interesting Times by George Packer:
“[The interview] was a step back from the almost definitive tone of “A War We Just Might Win†(a bad headline, and not the authors’). That tone was misplaced, and it is already being used by an Administration that has always thought tactically and will grasp any shred of support, regardless of the facts, to win the short-term argument. But look at this little tempest outside of politics, in the context of the war: Pollack and O’Hanlon were genuinely surprised by the changes they saw and heard about in Iraq, and they considered those changes significant enough to tell war critics here—in the overconfident shorthand of an Op-Ed—not to pull the plug just yet. Whatever you think of their past mistakes and present methods, it’s a case that shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.â€