If you read "A War We Just Might Win" yesterday in The New York Times and felt a glimmer of hope......

I try to keep an open mind. I try to be open to new information. When I read The New York Times op-ed yesterday, "A War We Just Might Win," I confess I felt a glimmer of hope that maybe the situation in Iraq isn't as bad as I've thought it is, and in the long run it will be okay.

The op-ed, by Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack who had just returned from an eight day trip to Iraq, included this sunny report: “We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms…. 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.”

Michael E. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings.

In the op-ed, O’Hanlon and Pollack described themselves as “…two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq….”

Thanks goodness for Glenn Greenwald, who blogs for Salon.com! Yesterday he posted "The really smart, serious, credible Iraq experts O'Hanlon and Pollack," subtitled “The most liberal ‘war hawks,' the Brookings 'scholars' falsely pretend that they were critics of the Iraq strategy to save their own reputations.”

Greenwald focuses on O’Hanlon and exposes him as a liar. So there went my glimmer of hope. If he’s been wrong so often in the past and in addition is attempting to cover up being wrong, why would I believe him now about the prospects in Iraq?

I’m not giving myself a bad time about being misled. Even George Packer, a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of the best seller, Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, described O’Hanlon and Pollack as having “long been critics of the war,” in his blog yesterday, "O'Hanlon and Pollack on the surge."

(sketch of Glenn Greenwald from his blog, Unclaimed Territory)