One Utah

Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution have been wrong about Iraq as long and as consistently as anyone. Pollack was a cheerleader for the Iraq war even before it happened; he wrote a book in 2002 called The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. Amazon.com will sell you a copy for one cent (plus shipping). I kid you not. Gives a whole new meaning to “a penny for your thoughts.”

O’Hanlon is famous for his steady stream of optimistic but wrong predictions going back to 2003. Both of them have been reality-challenged for years. Last year, they backed the Bush’s escalation 100 percent even before it was announced. Yet the gullible news media falsely describes them as “war critics.”

Yesterday these two geniuses published an upbeat New York Times op-ed claiming that the American effort in Iraq is succeeding. Obviously, what they wrote was pure spin, ignoring most if not all of the facts about the occupation and the collapse of the Iraqi so-called government. The question being asked today is, how can these guys get their propaganda published in a major newspaper? Why did they get on TV at least nine times in the last 24 hours?

Greg Sargent offers this analysis on Talking Points Memo (emphasis added):

At risk of oversimplification, a huge swath of the pundits, editors, columnists, think-tankers and all-purpose “insiders” that make up what we roughly call the Beltway establishment made the same catastrophic misjudgment that O’Hanlon and Pollack did.

…Bottom line: If these people were to conclude that O’Hanlon and Pollack’s disastrous failings should cast fatal doubt on their judgment, and all but disqualify them professionally, they’d have to disqualify themselves, too. They’d have to come to terms with the fact that their own awful judgment and disastrous professional failings rendered them complicit, in however limited a way, in bringing us the unending disaster we’ve got on our hands right now. And these folks just aren’t going to do this. The denial just runs too deep.

And here’s Atrios:

What’s amazing how simple it is, how willing our media - universally - are willing to catapult George Bush’s propaganda. I do not believe they are all that stupid, so they are willing accomplices in this disgusting game which perpetuates misery, death, and destruction. If our grand poobahs in the mainstream media want to know why us dirty fucking hippie bloggers hate them, this is why.

UPDATE: More facts about the fiasco continue to come out. There are 110,000 US-supplied AK-47 assault rifles unaccounted for in Iraq, and 80,000 pistols. When I was in the Army at Fort Hood, Texas, we once had to stay out in the field all night and search when one guy lost his M-16.

UPDATE: Interviewed last night on Larry King, VP Dick Cheney cited the O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed as evidence Iraq is going well. Mitt Romney said the same thing on the campaign trail in New Hampshire. These guys know how to catapult the propaganda!

UPDATE: The New York Times describes Pollack and O’Hanlon as “occasional critics of the Bush administration’s war strategy.” So it comes full circle.

This entry was posted Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 1:41 pm and is filed under 4th Estate (Media), Disaster, Iraq, War. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.