Monday, August 13, 2007

"Scholarship" Marinaded in the olde Cheney-Bush Septic Principles

This is a followup on earlier post on the deceitful Pollack and O'Hanlon Op-Ed. Giving credit where it's due, O'Hanlon submitted to an interview with the redoubtable Glenn Greenwald (now to be found posting, as we all know, at Salon). The conclusion is unavoidable; these two Brookings' Institute "scholars" (ok, "bumpkins" would be more accurate) are marginally ready for a junior-high-school-level internship on the subject of being journalists, never mind being (cough) "scholars." At best they have been long-time paid political marketer-shills, funded by the Neocon don who is behind the fully-politicized Brookings "institute." Their op-ed was, to be over-kind, disingenuous, they have been consistently dishonest in their interviews until Greenwald (the first apparently to ask a question that was hard), and the mainstream media has again had their head up one or another bodily orifice in dealing with this high-profile op-ed.

To repeat (ad nauseum), it is sickening what our former independent media now consider acceptable as to their job performance.

And as for Pollack and O'Hanlon, your parents should be and no doubt are ashamed, assuming they actually pay any attention to you at all any more. It is pathetic what you have tried to get away with here. Your actions are clearly anti-patriotic and un-American, as they involve deceit and an attempt to continue to encourage support of an illegal unprovoked war and invasion of an independent nation.

Here's Glenn (merely a taste; you really should cherish it in it's entirety):

Last Wednesday, I interviewed Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution regarding the trip he recently took to Iraq and the highly publicized Op-Ed in the New York Times about his trip, co-written with his Brookings colleague, Ken Pollack. The full transcript of the interview, which lasted roughly 50 minutes, can be read here.

O'Hanlon's answers, along with several other facts now known, demonstrate rather conclusively what a fraud this Op-Ed was, and even more so, the deceitfulness of the intense news coverage it generated. Most of the critical attention in the immediate aftermath of the media blitz focused on the misleading depiction of the pro-war Pollack and O'Hanlon as "critics of the administration." To his credit, O'Hanlon acknowledged (in my interview with him, though never in any of the media appearances he did) that many of the descriptions applied to him -- including Dick Cheney's claim that the Op-Ed was written by "critics of the war" -- were inaccurate:

First, I think that to an extent, at least, it's certainly fair to go over a person's record when that person themself is being held up as playing a certain role in the debate. So while I'm not entirely happy with some of the coverage I've received here [on this blog] and elsewhere, I agree with the basic premise: that if I'm being held up as a "critic of the war", for example by Vice President Cheney, it's certainly only fair to ask if that is a proper characterization of me. And in fact I would not even use that characterization of myself, as I will elaborate in a moment.

Indeed, as I documented previously and as he affirmed in the interview, O'Hanlon was, from the beginning, a boisterous supporter of the invasion of Iraq. While he debated what the optimal war strategy was, once it became clear exactly what strategy Bush would use, O'Hanlon believed -- and forcefully argued -- that George Bush was doing the right thing by invading Iraq:

As you rightly reported -- I was not a critic of this
war. In the final analysis, I was a supporter

He believed with virtual certainty that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD and that that fact constituted the principal justification for the invasion. In February, 2003, O'Hanlon wrote -- in a column entitled "Time for War" -- that the "president was still convincing on his central point that the time for war is near" and decreed that "it is now time for multilateralists to support the president." Not a single one of the television interviews Pollack and O'Hanlon gave about their Op-Ed included any reference to the fact that they were both supporters of the war and of the Surge.

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The gourmands among us might enjoy the meta-commentary here at FDL (again, you're missing a lot if you settle for my morsel):

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One by one, my man G2 demolishes the pillars supporting the conventional wisdom about O’Hanlon and Pollack’s wildly mendacious Op-Ed, “A War We Just Might Win” until finally, poor O’Hanlon must have desperately wanted to curl up and hide, whimpering, underneath the table. This is why over at Sadly, No! they call Greenwald, “Glennzilla”.

The lies are so thick on the ground around this issue that it’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s start with one of the more glaring falsehoods, that O’Hanlon and Pollack (both from the pro-Iraq-War “liberal” think tank, the Brookings Institute) were “fierce critics” of the president’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq.

I have to doff my hat to Greenwald for taking the time to wade through O’Hanlon’s verbal dreck, by the way. Clearly, Michael O’Hanlon has caught on to the think tank practice of using as many words as possible to say as little as you can conceivably get away with.

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