Friday, August 17, 2007
Opinion

Harshly criticised

"Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place..."

An Iraqi merchant displays fruit at the entrance of his shop in central Baghdad in July, at about the same time that Brookings fellows O’Hanlon and Pollock were there. CREDIT: Ali Yussef/AFP/Getty Images

By Stephanie Ramage

“Viewed from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.” Thus, Brookings Institution fellows Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollock began their July 30 op-ed column in the New York Times.

“Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand,” they continued. “We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily ‘victory’ but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.”

The claptrap that has occurred in response to their piece in the Times has amply proven the duo’s point that many of the administration’s detractors are so driven by their hatred of President Bush that they can’t allow themselves to see progress in Iraq, although it is clearly and irrefutably happening. The problem, say their critics, is that O’Hanlon and Pollack have not “harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq.” Well, not to put too fine a point upon it, but calling Bush’s handling of Iraq “miserable” might, by most standards, be considered harshly critical.

What has been lost in the boringly predictable rush to discredit anyone who sees anything at all positive in Iraq is truly critical thinking. Those who cite O’Hanlon and Pollock’s support for the war completely ignore the fact that neither of them has said they didn’t support the war. These same would-be “critics” have also ignored that what O’Hanlon and Pollock said was that they had, in the past, “harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq” (italics added as closed-captioning for the intellectually impaired).

What the two have added to the debate on Iraq since 2002 is a substantive body of work that is all the more critical because it is not rabidly anti-Bush. To be truly critical is to divorce oneself from the emotional ties one feels to a subject. The two have been wrongly accused of framing themselves in opposition to the war in order to strengthen the perception of an apparent conversion to supporting it. This is partisan garbage.

O’Hanlon and Pollock assumed that people who read their guest column in the Times would be familiar enough with their work to know what they were talking about. That’s a dangerous assumption to make, but we’ve all made it. In fact, following his Sunday Paper letter to the editor this week, John Burnett, the Baghdad correspondent for National Public Radio, wrote a separate e-mail to me in which he said that he expected that his listeners had listened to previous segments he had reported. Just as it never occurred to Burnett to explain that he was aware of a military history of humanitarian aid, it also never occurred to O’Hanlon and Pollock that some readers would tear “harshly criticized the Bush administration” away from the apostrophe at the end of “administration” and entirely out of context rather than reading the sentence to its end: “harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq.”

Remember a little book called “The Threatening Storm”? If you despise the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq, you should. In it, Pollock, who supported invading Iraq (at some point in the future), tore gaping holes in Bush’s method of doing so. Here’s what Slate’s Chris Suellentrop had to say about the book in March 2003, six months after it was published:

“In ‘The Threatening Storm,’ Pollack cautions the United States against behaving as a ‘rogue superpower’ that does whatever it wants, whenever it wants: ‘If we behave in this fashion [writes Pollock], we will alienate our allies and convince much of the rest of the world to band together against us to try to keep us under control. Rather than increasing our security and prosperity, such a development would drastically undermine it.’”

Pollack also posted a response to Suellentrop’s review that stated “… I am quite unhappy with many other aspects of our current preparedness [for war in Iraq]. In particular, I think the Administration has handled the diplomacy and public diplomacy of coalition building very poorly, and I am deeply concerned about the impact this will have both on postwar reconstruction and on our ability to garner allies for the inevitable next crisis.”

My column on O’Hanlon and Pollock’s post-Iraq-trip report was published Aug. 12. I included information from U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Edward Cardon, as well as from the office of Stuart Bowen, the special investigator general for Iraq reconstruction, and from his interview with NPR on July 31. These supplemental sources firmly verify O’Hanlon and Pollock’s report.

(Incidentally, the duo has not limited its critique to Iraq. In his analysis of the 9/11 Commission Report, O’Hanlon warned against many things, among them bringing the “intelligence czar” under the aegis of Bush’s office, writing, “By being within the White House, the new intelligence czar would be closer to the president—and thus more likely to be influenced by politics.” He also said Bush’s plan could well weaken our ability to gather intelligence.)

But, screams the anti-Brookings-report crowd, O’Hanlon and Pollock were—horrors!—escorted around Iraq by the U.S. military. Well, ladies, hold onto your petticoats, because they are certainly not alone in having been escorted by American troops in Iraq. It is, after all, a war zone, and there is probably not a single American journalist (or visiting scholar, for that matter) in Iraq who can safely go about his or her business without at least the tacit cooperation of the U.S. military. They may not be holding hands, but each tends to keep an eye out for the other. That’s not to say the Department of Defense is controlling the content of their reports—pick up any newspaper, watch any newscast, listen to any broadcast, and it’s clear that’s not the case.

So why are people harping with so much unbridled rage over two words—“harshly criticized”—in O’Hanlon and Pollock’s 1,343-word column? Because everything else in that column is so incontrovertibly accurate that there’s nothing else for them to grab onto. The geek chorus has been reduced to quibbling over the meager semantic scraps of “harshly criticized,” which they have managed to divide and distribute like a few fishes and loaves of bread among the multitudes. This is the miracle of modern media. SP

Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.