Deadliest July yet for U.S. troops. 23% Rise in Iraqi Deaths in July. How does that square with “A War We Might Just Win"?

Yesterday I posted about the July 30th New York Times op-ed, A War We Might Just Win, by Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, and Glenn Greenwald’s post exposing the hypocrisy of O’Hanlon as he presents himself as a consistent opponent of the war in Iraq. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the liberal think tank, the Brookings Institution.

Glenn Greenwald is still hopping mad about the press’s unquestioning promoting of O’Hanlon and Pollack and their message of hope about the likelihood of success in Iraq. Please take a few minutes to read Greenwald’s July 31 post, A new low of mindlessness for our media - Returning to marvel once again at the deceitful Brookings Institution media spectacle.

My expert on Iraq is Juan Cole, (photo) who blogs at Informed Comment and at the group blog, Informed Comment Global Affairs. Posted this morning at Informed Comment: Deadliest July Yet for US Troops; 23% Rise in Iraqi Deaths in July. Also, according to Juan, June saw the highest number of over-all attacks since the war began.

Cole adds, “I saw Michael O'Hanlon of Brookings on CNN Sunday saying he thought that the violence was less now. (O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack also gave us that uh, optimistic, op-ed about 'a war we could win' in the NYT.) I'd be interested in knowing how he is measuring this supposed fall in violence. If it is the deadliest July ever for US troops in Iraq; if there is a 23% increase in Iraqi deaths over June; if there were more attacks in June than any time since April 2003-- how is that a decrease in violence? Somebody explain that to me.”

You might want to keep your eye on George Packer’s blog. On July 30, he posted that O’Hanlon and Pollack’s op-ed raised more questions than it answered. He promised to get back to us with the answers to these questions about their recent trip to Iraq:

“Who organized their schedule?

"How much time did they spend in each place they visited (Baghdad, Ramadi, Mosul, Tal Afar)?

"How many Iraqis did they speak with, and whom? Did they meet Iraqis without American officers present?

"What could and couldn’t they independently confirm from their briefings by military sources? For example, how do they know that, in Mosul and Tal Afar, ‘the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover the countryside’?”

"Finally, what do they mean when they declare at the end, “There is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008”? As of a few weeks ago, O’Hanlon advocated a partition of Iraq and Pollack was talking about containing the civil war within Iraq’s borders. Neither of them had much faith that the Administration’s strategy could succeed. Have they changed their minds? If so, what’s their political strategy for sustaining the surge into 2008?"

(photo of Juan Cole from Informed Comment)

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)