Glenn Greenwald Interviews Fake War Critic Michael O'Hanlon

A couple of weeks ago, Michael O'Hanlon and Kevin Pollack of the Brookings Institute published an opinion piece in the New York Times which claimed that the United States is "finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms."

Of course, right-wing extremists have been claiming this kind of nonsense for a long time -- who could ever forget Dick Cheney's "the insurgency is in its final throes" remark from 2005 -- but several members of the Radical Right (including Cheney) treated O'Hanlon and Pollack's op-ed piece as gospel because these two men claimed to be "war critics." Well, it turns out (surprise!) that they're not war critics after all. In fact, they are actually Bill Kristol-type war cheerleaders.

Glenn Greenwald has taken the lead in exposing these fakes to the world, and his recent interview of O'Hanlon is nothing short of spectacular. You can read the whole interview here; or, if you don't have that much time, you can read Greenwald's article regarding this interview here.

Of course, Greenwald covers much ground with regard to O'Hanlon's supposed status as a "war critic," and actually got O'Hanlon to make this admission:

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

Well, it sure would have been nice if O'Hanlon had admitted that from the start or at least mentioned it in one of the interviews he gave to the Corporate Media after the piece was published. That little detail must have slipped his mind.

But Greenwald's interview is most interesting when he asks O'Hanlon about the trip to Iraq which provided the basis for the O'Hanlon/Pollack op-ed piece. Here are some excerpts from Greenwald's article:

But the far greater deceit involves the trip itself and the way it was represented -- both by Pollack/O'Hanlon as well as the excited media figures who touted its significance and meaning. From beginning to end, this trip was planned, shaped and controlled by the U.S. military -- a fact inexcusably concealed in both the Op-Ed itself and virtually every interview the two of them gave. With very few exceptions, what they saw was choreographed by the U.S. military and carefully selected for them. * * *

I have nothing against O'Hanlon personally; he was perfectly cordial and professional in my dealings with him and I think he deserves credit for agreeing to be interviewed in light of what I had written about his Op-Ed. But it is very difficult to credit him and Pollack with good faith, as though they are guilty of nothing more than sloppy "scholarship."

A failure to disclose obviously critical facts that bear on the credibility of their "findings" and a willingness to ground their conclusions in patently one-sided and highly controlled data are far more serious sins than mere sloppiness. It is difficult to avoid reaching any conclusion other than that they willfully served as propaganda tools in order to bolster the perception of success for a war and a "Surge" strategy which they prominently supported and on which their professional reputations rest.

Read the whole article. It's worth it.