Matthew Yglesias (July 30, 2007) - Conceding a Point (Domestic Policy)

The biggest single impediment to their careers is the massive enmity and presumptions of bad faith aimed at them by fellow liberals.

That--from Chait--wrong. It's clear that HRC is fairly hawkish--see the conservative/Republican groundswell of "she's not that bad" or "best of the worst" articles--and if HRC is President, the enmity of liberals is going be small beer indeed.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 30, 2007 6:21 PM

Can one speculate about your refusal to proofread?

Posted by sherifffruitfly | July 30, 2007 6:23 PM

It’s not a secret that most historians and other experts in the field predicted hard times, and more specifically sectarian violence, to follow an invasion of Iraq. A review of the debate before the American invasion in 2003 shows that sectarian violence wasn’t simply feared by experts as a possibility but was feared as a necessary consequence. Faced with certain violence to follow an invasion and thus the need for the continued expenditure of funds even after the initial victory of toppling Saddam Hussein, it is upsetting that the United States, or really, the pentagon, insisted on going to war.

Today, the defense budget is $522 billion, largely due to the war in Iraq. To put this number in perspective, one needs only to know that it would take only $19 billion—a fraction of this year’s defense budget—to eliminate starvation and malnutrition worldwide. Recognizing the achievability of eliminating global hunger, the United States has publicly committed itself to this goal by signing the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals, which call for cutting world hunger in half by 2015 and eliminating it altogether by 2025. Hence, by disengaging in the Iraq War, which has cost the United States upwards of $340 billion dollars thus far, the United States can begin to fulfill its international commitments and addresses, among other pressing world problems, the easily combatable one of world hunger.

Posted by Jessica | July 30, 2007 6:26 PM

RE Jon Chait's comment at the Plank:
"If I were Ken Pollack and I wanted a job advising the next Democratic president, I would flamboyantly denounce the surge and demand a pullout from Iraq."
---------
This, of course, is bullshit and Jon Chait should know it's bullshit.

If Pollack want a job advising HRC, he should do whatever Haim Saban wants him to.

After all, Haim Saban is not just the founder/funding source of the think tank where Kenneth works. Haim Saban is also the billionaire who's raised $1Million+ this year to make Hillary President.

Posted by Don Williams | July 30, 2007 6:42 PM

Don Williams,

How much time to you honestly think I spend micro-managing the research people publish at the Saban Center? I mean, seriously? I am a multi-billionaire who lives in L.A. You ever watch Entourage on HBO? My life is like that, only better. I haven't the time or interest to dictate anything to the scholars at the center I endowed, and it's not like those eggheads are going to take dictation from me anyway.

I'm a smart businessman, no doubt, but what do I know from politics? My expertise is in figuring out what piece of crappy pop culture American kids will devour like Honey Comb cereal (do you know of this cereal? Growing up in Egypt, I longed to taste it...).

By the way, I don't dictate policy to Hillary Clinton either. I give her money because I trust her to make the right decisions. Plus giving her money makes me look good to my blond shiksa wife and her Hollywood yenta friends -- it's either that or give up my Rolls for a ridiculous Prius, and that is not happening, my friend.

Posted by Haim Saban | July 30, 2007 6:54 PM

I'll just repost a comment of mine from July 22 on another surge/casualty counting post you had, since it hasn't received any responses and I'm wondering if anyone would care to comment:

Two points:

1) The surge technically has only recently started to operate; troop levels did not reach what was contemplated until about a month or so ago, IIRC. Which makes both the chestthumping about how well the surge was working and the hair-tearing about how poorly it is faring equally misplaced.

2) You can't really tell anything about the effectiveness of a take-clear-and hold plan (which is what the surge is) based on raw numbers. If attacks are going up in Iraq as a whole, but down in the areas of Baghdad that the surge is concentrated in its initial push, then the surge is doing what it was meant to do: create areas of safety in the city that is the literal and metaphorical heart of Iraq. And those zones of safety can be built on and expanded outward, hopefully. If that is the case, I'd *expect* the number of attacks to go up, as insurgents or al-qaeda seek to get the US to abandon the plan and go chasing after them in the latest hotspot; that type of "whack-a-mole" strategy is a recipe for failure.

On the other hand, if the attacks are distributed across areas in roughly the same proportions next month as they were 4 months ago, and the surge isn't impacting that, then the surge is failing in its objective.

Either way, tallying up the total number of daily attacks across Iraq doesn't give you a meaningful basis to draw conclusions one way or the other

Posted by Akiva M | July 30, 2007 6:55 PM

Matt,

You're entirely right about the political challenge being the center of gravity in Iraq. This was put beautifully by one close observer of the Iraqi situation back in December 2006:

"The problem is most easily understood in this way. What was most needed in Iraq by early 2004 and on through 2005 and 2006, were basic security and basic services for the Iraqi people (electricity, water, sanitation, gasoline, as well as jobs, medical care, and in some cases food). The militia leaders exerted their power by laying claim to areas of the country that the government's security forces--and the Americans--could not occupy or patrol. They then built public support by providing the security and basic services that the government could not, explicitly following the model employed so successfully by Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. The best way for the federal government to rid the country of the problem of the militias was to acquire the capacity to provide both the security and the services for the Iraqi people so that they would not have to rely on the militias. However, with the militia leaders running the central government, they had absolutely no interest in having it acquire such capacity, because doing so would mean the loss of their own power bases. Thus they had every incentive to continue to use their posts in the government to reward their cronies, steal as much from the public coffers as they could, and otherwise block their adversaries from doing so--without lifting a finger to actually address the most desperate needs of the Iraqi state. Likewise, they had no incentive to cut real deals with their adversaries, particularly the Sunni tribal leaders, because doing so would bring them into the government, giving them access to the same power and graft, and thereby creating a threat to their growing control of the country and its resources."

Yes, yes, of course, I'm playing gotcha. This is from Kenneth Pollack (http://www.brookings.edu/views/articles/pollack/20061214.htm)

All of these experts fail the first test: they have no strategic concept for victory. They have no idea how to tie the surge and the new counter-insurgency/counter-al Qaeda strategy into a larger political/military strategy. They are left with a bumper sticker: the surge will give a "breathing space" for the politicians to come together. I simply have no idea what that means except possibly: "We've lost but I really really hate to admit it."

Posted by santamonicamr | July 30, 2007 6:57 PM

Matt, I think Chait's clearly wrong about the piece. You are clearly right to suspect the piece is written from a bad faith position. The reason for this is the text of the piece itself.

Or a particular part of the piece that has caught the attention and the scorn of the liberal blogosphere in the second graf:

"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."

As anybody within reach of google knows, that grossly distorts both O'Hanlon and Pollack's view of the war. While they might have harshly criticized this or that part of Bush's strategy, they supported the invasion. And, more pertinently, they supported the surge. If they were going to give us a fair notion of their own position, that piece of information is highly pertinent. That they have criticized Bush is not.

So why don't they give us this piece of information?
The reason has to be found in the audience they want the piece to go to. If they really wanted the piece to go to a liberal or a Democratic audience, surely they wouldn't have tried, in the second graf, to infuriate that audience with that kind of dishonest description.

However, if the audience is on the right, this description would fall pretty precisely into the rightwing stereotypes dear to the war party. It would make it seem like O'Hanlon and Pollack are honest liberal brokers, rather than advocates of the Iraq war. It could be used, as it has been, with dull predictability, by the Hewitts and the Ann Althouses and the rest of the circle jerk to execute a favorite tactic - putting a ringer liberal in place of a real one. This either means exhibiting someone who believes the CIA blew up the towers on 9/11 as a typical liberal, or exhibiting a war hawk as a typical liberal.

O'Hanlon and Pollack have played the media game for a long time, and they knew exactly what they were doing with this dishonest paragraph. So, at the very least, there's a strong case for positioning. Positioning isn't job-seeking - it is facetime seeking. It is putting oneself out there to be interviewed. They guarantee right wing celebrity with that sentence, and they know it.

That Chait says it is a fair on-the-ground appraisal is, of course, bogus. There is a paragraph where they talk about going to Mosul and talking to one of the local mayors in the area. Why didn't they talk to the mayor of Mosul? Perhaps because the province authority, which is in the hands of allies of Maliki, are trying to get rid of him because he did not shut down a Mosul paper that published a 'disrespectful' cartoon of Maliki. As for the reliable police of Tal Afer, these are the same Kurdish peshmerga who massacred 70 or more Sunnis on March 27 after a truck bomb killed more than 152? Ah, but that was months ago! They've magically become reliable since.

It is just stupid. To have to prove that wheels are round day after day. And eventually, you are right to suspect that people busy proving wheels are actually square have some ulterior motive for doing so.

Posted by roger | July 30, 2007 6:59 PM

I'm guessing there'll be no Shots After Dark for O'Hanlon or Pollack -- or any blogger who doesn't post something to discredit them today. Young Ezra has probably already spread the word through his private e-mail list.

Posted by Fred | July 30, 2007 6:59 PM

Wow! Four posts on the O'Hanlon - Pollack op-ed in one day. Those guys seem to have really struck a nerve!

Posted by Campesino | July 30, 2007 7:01 PM

Jessica,

Just $19 billion and no more world poverty? Sounds too good to be true. Either that, or we overpaid spending $15 billion just to treat AIDS in Africa. For that money, we could have ended 15/19ths of the world's poverty.

Posted by Fred | July 30, 2007 7:03 PM

RE Jon Chait's comment at the Plank:
"I'm just saying there's a pretty strong chance that they [Kenneth Pollack et al] actually believe what they're writing. "
------------
1) Oh sure. Maybe Chait could use his Vulcan mind meld and tell us whether Kenneth Pollack actually believed what Pollack wrote in a New York Times OpEd on June 20, 2003.

Titled "Saddam's Bombs? We'll Find Them " , an antsy Pollack tried to distance himself from his earlier statements (re Hussein working feverishly on building nuclear bombs, was probably close to success,etc ) by pointing the finger at the Bush WHite House.

An excerpt:
"Moreover, before the war I heard many complaints from friends still in government that some Bush officials were mounting a ruthless campaign over intelligence estimates. I was told that when government analysts wrote cautious assessments of Iraq's capabilities, they were grilled and forced to go to unusual lengths to defend their judgments, and some were chastized for failing to come to more alarming conclusions. None of this is illegal, but it was perceived as an attempt to browbeat analysts into either changing their estimates or shutting up and ceding the field to their more hawkish colleagues."

Ref: http://www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/pollack/20030620.htm

2) The only problem with this statement is that it is contradicted by the Commission on Iraq Intelligence. The Commission examined this claim and found:
" The Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. As we discuss in detail in the body of our report, analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments. "

See http://www.wmd.gov/report/report.html#chapter1
Paragraph just before the section titled "The Iraq Study" and at the end of the section "How It Happened".

3) Can anyone point out to me where Kenneth Pollack objected to this finding? I would think that if I made a major claim to the Nation in a New York Times OpEd -- and that claim was explicitly refuted by a National Commission -- then I would want to show where the Commission was mistaken. If I hoped to have any credibility. Especially if I planned to write future OpEds and advise Presidents.

Posted by Don Williams | July 30, 2007 7:12 PM

Pollack doesn't need to do squat at this point for a job with the HRC Crew. He has Right Wing and Broderian Centrist Cred amongst the wobbly voters and Beltway Pundit King/QueenMakers. Assuming she nabs the nomination, the job's his for the taking; he could even name his price.

Posted by ed | July 30, 2007 7:14 PM

Re Santamonicamr's comment "They are left with a bumper sticker: the surge will give a "breathing space" for the politicians to come together "
----------
Except that the "politicians" -- the Iraqi Parliament -- just voted to go on vacation until September. Which is hilarious -- because that's the date when General Petreus is supposed to tell us how much progress the Iraqi politicans have been making.

Although I'm starting to understand why Bush likes these people. Going on a long vacation in 2007 when your country is collapsing is similar to going on a long vacation in 2001 when you've been warned that Al Qaeda is about to strike.

Posted by Don Williams | July 30, 2007 7:24 PM

Some more Kenneth Pollack gems from his June 2003 New York Times OpEd:
------

1)
"Still, no matter what the trailers turn out to be, the failure so far to find weapons of mass destruction in no way invalidates the prewar intelligence data indicating that Iraq had the clandestine capacity to build them. There has long been an extremely strong case—based on evidence that largely predates the Bush administration—that Iraq maintained programs in weapons of mass destruction. It was this evidence, along with reports showing the clear failure of United Nations efforts to impede Iraq's progress, that led the Clinton administration to declare a policy of "regime change" for Iraq in 1998....
...These episodes, and others like them, explain why many former Clinton administration officials, including myself (I was on the staff of the National Security Council in the 90's), agreed with the Bush administration that a war would likely be necessary to prevent Iraq from acquiring nuclear and other weapons. We may not have agreed with the Bush team's timing or tactics, but none of us doubted the fundamental intelligence basis of its concerns about the Iraqi threat."
Ref: http://www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/pollack/20030620.htm

2) Let's see -- in June 2003 Kenneth Pollack is strongly DEFENDING to the Nation an intelligence process and resulting PRODUCT that was denounced as fucked up beyond all belief by the Commission on Iraq Intelligence.

Denounced with many detailed examples, I should add.

3) Yet Jon Chait thinks Pollack has credibility? Why?

Posted by Don Williams | July 30, 2007 7:35 PM

it's all neither here not that

Is this the fabled "predictive typing" of the iPhone?

Posted by worm eater | July 30, 2007 7:35 PM

Chait doesn't think Pollack has credibility. He said Pollack is making the argument in good faith -- he believes this stuff, even if it's not true. That's not "credibility."

Anyway, nobody knows his motives. I try not to speculate about people's motives, and I really try not to assume that my opponents are arguing in bad faith.

Posted by too many steves | July 30, 2007 7:41 PM

In a just world Kenneth Pollack will soon lose whatever policy-related job he has and never work in policy or politics again, even tangentially.

It's not going to happen, because this is not a just world.

Posted by synic | July 30, 2007 7:49 PM

1) Another example where Kenneth Pollack no doubt "actually believed what he was writing". From his June 2003 NYTimes OpED:

"And it wasn't just the United States that was concerned about Iraq's efforts. By 2002, British, Israeli and German intelligence services had also concluded that Iraq was probably far enough along in its nuclear weapons program that it would be able to put together one or more bombs at some point in the second half of this decade. The Germans were actually the most fearful of all—in 2001 they leaked their estimate that Iraq might be able to develop its first workable nuclear device in 2004."

2) Yet isn't this statement to the American people by Pollack deceitful?? -- given that Germany's Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer had told Rumsfeld at a Munich conference in Feb 2003 that he(Fischer) was not convinced by Rumsfeld's intelligence that there was a need for war. I remember Fischer trying to make the same point on TV.

Posted by Don Williams | July 30, 2007 7:52 PM

Chait could be right about Pollack and O'Hanlon being in earnest, but his reasoning is totally flawed. Being justly reviled by the netroots is not even the slightest impediment to either of them being on the National Security Council in the next administration. But opposing the war beforehand (as opposed to the proverbial "incompetence dodge") would have guaranteed their being branded as "unserious", indeed would have been career suicide.

Posted by kth | July 30, 2007 8:18 PM

Jon Chait summed up his whole piece, and his entire worldview as it relates to Iraq in a single sentence:

"It's hard for me to evaluate whether their argument is correct, but the on-the-ground evidence they present from their recent trip to Iraq deserves to be treated seriously."

It's hard, so Jon isn't going to try. And, that stenography they took during their two days in the Green Zone -- that should be treated oh so seriously.

Posted by Bruce Wilder | July 30, 2007 9:11 PM

The line which made an impression on me was Just a few months ago, American marines were fighting for every yard of Ramadi; last week we strolled down its streets without body armor.

If that means exactly what it says, then it is an enormous risk to take merely to give us Koolaid.

Me, I'd like to see wide-angle photographs of O'Hanlon and Pollack strolling down Ramadi streets.

Posted by Arun | July 30, 2007 9:30 PM

"It's hard, so Jon isn't going to try."

And neither are you, Bruce Wilder. Your mind is made up; facts are irrelevant.

Posted by Juan | July 30, 2007 9:39 PM

Late to this argument (have you heard that KG is a Celtic?), but I have no doubt they are not sincere, honest, or serious.

These are people that have staked their reputations on this disaster. Much like Danny Ainge, they're all-in.

Bush is more likely to concede the truth than these 'scholars'. I'm not kidding.

Posted by Andruw | July 30, 2007 9:50 PM

The smart play for the job-seeker is probably to just not say anything.

Exactly right.

Posted by Ed Marshall | July 30, 2007 10:21 PM

Well, depends on what job.

Maybe this is what they believe they have to do not to get fired from the Brookings institute.

Posted by Ed Marshall | July 30, 2007 11:32 PM

Come to think of it why the hell does the Brookings middle east division exist? Does WINEP have a branding problem and they decided to buy a franchise with name recognition? Why bother still running WINEP if that's the case?

Posted by Ed Marshall | July 30, 2007 11:45 PM

If O'Hanlon and Pollack are harsh critics of the President, then dailykos.com ranks up there with Osama bin Laden. Once you understand the wingnuttery scale, it makes sense.

Posted by Arun | July 30, 2007 11:47 PM

I'm not giving any benefit of the doubt to O'Hanlon and Pollack here. They know precisely what they are doing, and what kind of game they are playing. The whole point of these trips is not actually to learn anything about Iraq, but just to put in an appearance so that you can say you've been there, and assure your readers that the tasty propaganda you are now ladling out was harvested personally, and has the infallible savor of first hand experience.

We've been seeing some version of this same "I've just returned from Iraq, and things are looking up!" report for years now. Max Boot, Richard Perle, Christopher Hitchens - haven't they all made the requisite pilgrimage, and dutifully pretended to swallow to pretty pictures served up for them?

O'Hanlon and Pollock have been studying the ways of war throughout their careers, and shouldn't be indulged as merely optimistic and well-meaning saps who were easily taken in. They actually have a clue. But as supporters of staying the course, they believe it is their duty to boost morale on the homefront by trumpeting good news to yokels. So now Al-Hanlon al-Arabia and Ibn Polluqa have made their American Hajj, have taken their seven counterclockwise turns around the Green Zone, and have returned to bear witness. And what do you know? Things are looking up! Al-Petraeus Akhbar!

As in every war, there are people in Iraq whose full time job it is to serve as minders and tour guides for visiting dignitaries and court scribblers. Every happy Iraqi on the arranged tour knows what role he is supposed to play, and knows what is in it for him if he plays it. O'Hanlon and Pollock can't pretend not to know that, and yet they don't even bother to offer anything in their puff piece to assure the reader that they ventured away from the tour bus and struck out on their own. I don't think they even expect to be taken seriously. But they might have earned some cred with their military buddies by acting like good soldiers, dutifully eating and shoveling the shit for Uncle Sam.

Posted by Dan Kervick | July 31, 2007 12:30 AM

My clear impression of their Op-Ed, was that they were doing what they could to minimize the impact of the facts that were right in their faces. In fact, every statement they made about the Bush Administration did exactly that -- trashed the President, in spite of the reality that the writers were faced with the fact that things were working out well for our nation on several significant levels.

As an American, I simply cannot imagine rooting against the United States in an armed conflict when significant opposition parties are pressing for the adoption of an ideology that believes that "the truth" lies with those who would impose a 7th Ccentury crazed ideology on the modern world. And, in a general sense, I personally cannot imagine rooting against the United States in an armed conflict.

But rooting against the U.S.A. on behalf of cave-dwelling retro-scum?

Please, put your finger down your throats!

Posted by Trochilus | July 31, 2007 12:33 AM

1)I think that if you look at what Kenneth Pollack wrote in 2002-2003 , you start to form an opinion re whether Pollack actually "believes what he is writing."

2) In another excerpt from Pollack's June 2003 NYTIMES OpEd, Pollack gives us a lofty, "objective" and "expert" evaluation of Bush policy:

"Before the war, some administration officials clearly tended to emphasize in public only the most dire aspects of the intelligence agencies' predictions. For example, of greatest importance were the estimates of how close Iraq was to obtaining a nuclear weapon. The major Western intelligence services essentially agreed that Iraq could acquire one or more nuclear bombs within about four to six years. However, all also indicated that it was possible Baghdad might be able to do so in as few as one or two years if, and only if, it were able to acquire fissile material on the black market.

This latter prospect was not very likely. The Iraqis had been trying to buy fissile material since the 1970's and had never been able to do so. Nevertheless, some Bush administration officials chose to stress the one-to-two-year possibility rather than the more likely four-to-six year scenario. Needless to say, if the public felt Iraq was still several years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon rather than just a matter of months, there probably would have been much less support for war this spring."
Ref: http://www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/pollack/20030620.htm

3) My memory is kinda poor so I did some checking to find out exactly who in the Bush Administration was telling us in 2002 that Hussein was on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon.

After a little research I found a bestselling book from 2002 titled "The THREATENING STORM" that had some very scary ghost stories:

p. xxvii: "Today, we have information from key defectors and a consensus among knowledgable experts that the Iraqis are hard at work on such a [nuclear weapons] program"

p.174: "A recent defector who worked as a design engineer stated that Saddam had ordered the entire nuclear program reconstituted in August 1998, when he announced that he had ceased all cooperation with the UN Inspectors.

p.174-5: "Given the difficulties Iraq was having using any of its various methods before th Gulf War, the US intelligence community has estimated that it would take Iraq five to ten years from the start of a crash program to enrich enough uranium to make one or more devices. If such a crash program started in 1999, Iraq might be able to develop such weapons by 2004. "

p. 175: "Moreover, Iraq has been actively looking to buy black market enriched uranium from the former Soviet Union, North Korea, China, Pakistan, or anyone else who might be willing to sell it. So far, Iraq has had no luck , but if it is able to buy it ready made , it could then probably build a workable device in a year or two."

4) I checked the cover of the book to find out which WHite House aide wrote this crock of shit and discover that ..ta da.. it was written by Kenneth Pollack.

5) Again note the bizarre situation: In June 2003, Kenneth Pollack is denouncing the Bush Administration for doing the very same things that Kenneth was doing in his book in 2002.

In 2003, Kenneth tells us that the Likelihood of
Iraq being able to buy enriched uranium on the black market is "not very likely".

But he does NOT tell us that in 2002 HE was the one who raised that possibility -- and failed to tell America at that time that the scenario he was proposing "was not very likely".

Posted by Don Williams | July 31, 2007 12:39 AM

Well, you successfully gamed the system for the hottest media types, MY.

Posted by Freddie | July 31, 2007 12:57 AM

And, in a general sense, I personally cannot imagine rooting against the United States in an armed conflict

So why bother with anything else? The rest of it's garbage, but if you are going to admit it's all about rooting against the home team what's the point? Bush could invade X and harvest baby skin or something and it would by your job personally to register your disgust that someone didn't like it and must be rooting for the Yankee's if they didn't. Generally.

Posted by Ed Marshall | July 31, 2007 1:08 AM

Speaking of "job-seekers"... Saying something like "there's no particular reason to privilege on the ground" knowledge" is the mark of a truly bad journalist trying to earn his keep as a blogger. The arm-chair politicking about the war in this space is truly, truly tiresome. Matt--go to Iraq. Then perhaps you'd find something worthwhile to write about.

Packer, who has spent a looong time there, actually sounds like he knows what he's talking about in his critique of the Pollack/O'Hanlon piece: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker

Posted by ontheground | July 31, 2007 1:44 AM

Matthew Yglesias:

"I'd be interested to know what Jon, in particular, thinks about all that."

I think it's pretty funny, and telling, that you'd rather wrangle about O'Hanlon and Pollack than engage the substance of the O'Hanlon and Pollack assessment.

You can't really engage on substance, can you? You regularly cite the ostensible "numbers," but you're really just extrapolating politically from a very limited set of middling, publicly available, possibly reliable statistics which have, in fact, been fed to you by a subset of media sources, aren't you? Of course, if officialdom is officially tainted, the small universe of data you're interpreting shrinks still further. And all the while, you can do little more than assume that O'Hanlon & Pollack are only reporting the latest propaganda, because you, yourself, don't know enough to assess the information they proffer, do you?

What first hand sources, if any, do you actually rely on? I might have suggested the New York Times' John Burns, for one, but alas, he's apparently gone over to the enemy. Given the horrified uproar over Petraeus a mere two weeks ago, I would have to conclude that Burns' usefulness in this arena has similarly come to an end. Given your aversion to serious discussion with anyone who doesn't fundamentally share your perspective, is it any wonder that you largely end up talking amongst yourselves?

Thus are we, indeed, left with the matter of the war itself, and a self-sustaining, well nigh impermeable, narrative that's been looking backward so long, it doesn't know how to evaluate or incorporate real time input any more.

Posted by JM Hanes | July 31, 2007 4:28 AM

As a conservative, it is amusing to see the Left battling about what the improving situation in Iraq means. Iraq sectarian casualties are down by 1/3rd according to Hanlon and Coalition data; Anbar province has seen a remarkable turnaround. This is not surprising when your foreign allies decide to impose Sharia Law and start chopping the fingers off of smokers and slaughtering children...
we know the enemy will counterattack with massive car bombs in the next few months, timed to coincide with the Democrats ramping up the surrender cry in the Fall when Gen Petreus gives his report...remember, like the Communists, they use you guys to further their goals, so I am sure you won't let us down...please make sure to make plenty of comments when it happens...something like "see!! Told you so!! You changed tactics a few months ago and look!! There has been no change!! Let's get out and screw the Middle East...Obama for President!! BusHitler! BusHitler!! Remember Lennon's song Imagine!! We deserved 9/11!!
All the evidence suggests a massive slaughter and destabilization of the Middle East if we leave...your project kids is to predict a worst case scenario and say why this would be beneficial for the United States Strategic Policy ...or is the loss of the Middle East, Israel and the creation of new areas for Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism a good thing for the Left? Well, we're here in America, so we're safe...phew!

Posted by Rich | July 31, 2007 8:56 AM

Rich, how did you come to be such a sick idiot?

Posted by Jennifer | July 31, 2007 9:04 AM

Well you war supporters finally did it. I'm now convinced that

1) We are fighting for freedom in Iraq
2) If we don't win our fight for freedom we'll end up part of a 7th century caliphate
3) The "Iraqi people" is not a nonsensical concept and actually describes a unitary mass of Muslim Arabs.
4) The different sects aren't going to continue fighting each other if we just stay there and provide adult guidance
5) Pollack and O'Hanlon went to Iraq and did some serious in the trenches war reporting. They struck out on their own, talked to Iraqi's they met and felt safe enough to walk the countryside
6) Leftists want the U.S. to lose because they hate America
7) Iraqi's will be much better off with their future dictator than with their past one
8) The national interest of the US was to destabilize Iraq so that Iran could be put on notice we are serious about keeping them from destabilizing Iraq
9) The war was a good idea from the beginning
10) If only the left loved the troops we'd have won this war already
11) We haven't been tough enough on the Iraqis and if we'd just be more brutal we'd win this dang war
12) The right-wing actually has a clue about ... and a definition for what "winning" in Iraq actually would mean
13) The right-wing has figured out which sect to back in the Iraqi civil war so that terrorism is defeated, Iraq is stabilized, and Iran is thwarted.
14) Fingers getting tired ... but y'all can fill in the rest...

_

Posted by Curt M | July 31, 2007 9:07 AM

1) Isn't it interesting how the right wing fanatics stick their noses up the rectums of Big Oil and the Israel Lobby -- and call it "supporting America"?

Since when do self-serving whores get to call themselves Patriots?

2) Me, I support the People of this country -- NOT the whores of rich men who have caused the unnecessary deaths of over 7000 of our citizens and who have stolen over $3 TRILLION from the Trust Funds needed to provide health care to our elderly in the decades to come. That theft will kill millions more Americans before their time.

3) Given the deep BETRAYAL of this country by the Bush/Cheney Administration and FOX News/Rush Limbaugh,etc , what right in hell do their supporters have to wave the American flag??

Given their PROUD Stupidity, their WILLFUL ignorance, their love of deceitful propaganda, their history of EVIL -- what right does this scum have to call themselves Americans??

4) They don't recognize what they've done. Because --like their leaders -- they never get within a 1000 miles of an active battlefield.

5) I remember when I was 12 years old, an older friend of mine --Larry Sayers -- was drafted and sent to Vietnam. A few months later, Larry came back in a coffin. I remember going to his funeral, standing at the head of the coffin ,and seeing under his uniform collar that his throat had been cut from ear to ear. I remember his mother crying her heart out over in the corner -- a continuous low anguished moan.

Such a loss. For what?
Yes, LBJ was President. But he was driven by the long time clique of Republican fanatics in Congress who were happy to send blue collar sons to Vietnam while reserving places in the Texas Air Guard for their sons. To protect the country from Ho Chi Minh's transoceanic air force ,no doubt.

6) If some grieving parent who has lost a son in Iraq picked up a gun and started killing our war-worshipping scum, I would not convict that parent if I was on the jury.

Posted by Don Williams | July 31, 2007 9:40 AM

Well, the O'Hanlon 'one last shot' drinking game will keep us all drunk for a long time. He and Pollock are getting plain dull in their repeated pleas for one last try at finding the magic pony.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | July 31, 2007 11:47 AM

If I didn't know better Don, I'd think you were suggesting that if we could just kill all the people who support this war, then all would be good. Tall order. You'd better pack a lunch.

Posted by Immolate | July 31, 2007 2:25 PM

Conceding a Point

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