Sunday August 12, 2007 09:36 EST
The truth behind the Pollack-O’Hanlon trip to Iraq
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.
Throughout 2003 and into 2004, O’Hanlon supported not only the war,
but also Bush and Rumsfeld’s occupation strategy. And while he began to
argue — just as did Bill Kristol and his neoconservative comrades
— that improvements were needed in Iraq due to the need for more
troops, there was never a point, and there still is none, where
O’Hanlon argued for withdrawal of troops or a timetable for withdrawal
(though in 2004, he argued for a decrease in troop numbers). Then, in
2005, he argued for troop increases. At the beginning of this year,
O’Hanlon (and Pollack) supported George Bush’s and Fred Kagan’s Surge
plan.
Manifestly, then, to describe them as “aggressive critics of the
Bush administration’s handling of the war” or as “critics of the war”
— as virtually every media figure and pro-war pundit did with no
correction — is misleading in the extreme. In no meaningful sense is
Michael O’Hanlon any more of a “strong critic of the administration” or
“vigorous opponent of Bush’s war policies” than Bill Kristol or Fred
Kagan, who also frequently bickered over the administration’s strategic
choices, accused them of poor war management, and/or called for a
greater troop presence.
While this entire group of “war scholars” continuously objected to
various strategies executed along the way — they always believed they
harbored the undiscovered Perfect Plan for this war — they were in the
past and are now full-throated supporters of the invasion itself and
Bush’s subsequent occupation. They are full-fledged members of the
small minority of Americans who have been pro-war since before the
invasion and who continue to be. The contrary media depictions of
O’Hanlon and Pollack (which they actively encouraged) were just pure
fiction.
* * * * *
“The itinerary the D.O.D. developed”
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. This is O’Hanlon’s description of how the
trip was conceived:
GG: I just want to ask you some questions about the trip that you just
took. Whose idea was that trip? How did that trip arise and who planned
it?MO: Well, I have wanted to go back to Iraq for a long time. I
feel it’s- I’ve been there once in September 2003 – it behoves
anybody who’s working on this issue a lot of the time as I’ve been for
a few years trying to get some on-the-ground experience and
observations. And so I’ve been trying to get back for a couple of years
and I started putting in these requests a little bit more assertively –GG: Who did you put them in with?
MO: To the military, starting in about the spring.
GG: And then, at some point they accepted and said that they would organize a trip for you?
MO: Yeah. I think the trip was ultimately originally scheduled for
other people as well. I think it’s public knowledge that Tony Cordesman
was also on our trip, and I think he had plans to go before Ken and I
managed to get ourselves invited as well, but —GG: Why did you need the permission of the U.S. military in order to go? Why couldn’t you just go yourself?
MO: I suppose I could have, but I was hopeful that someone could help
take care of my security, for one thing. I’m not going to try to sound
more heroic than I am. And also I wanted to talk to a lot of military
personnel and get their impressions.
The
entire trip — including where they went, what they saw, and with whom
they spoke — consisted almost entirely of them faithfully following
what O’Hanlon described as “the itinerary the D.O.D. developed.”
But to establish their credibility as first-hand witnesses,
O’Hanlon and Pollack began their Op-Ed by claiming, in the very first
sentence: “VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel. . . . ” Yet the overwhelming majority of these “Iraqi military and civilian personnel” were ones hand-picked for them by the U.S. military:
GG: The first line of your Op-Ed said:”viewed from Iraq where we just
spent the last eight days interviewing American and Iraqi military and
civilian personnel…”How did you arrange the meetings with the Iraqi military and civilian personnel?
MO: Well, a number of those — and most of those were arranged by the U.S. military.
So I’ll be transparent about that as well. These were to some extent
contacts of Ken and Tony, but that was a lesser number of people. The predominant majority were people who we came into contact with through the itinerary the D.O.D. developed.
I specifically asked O’Hanlon whether, as a result, he was concerned
that he was getting an unrepresentative view of the situation in Iraq,
and in response he said:
If someone wanted to argue that
we were not getting a representative view of Iraqis because the ones we
spoke with were provided by the military, I would agree that this would
be a genuine concern. Certainly that might have influenced the
impressions that we were presented, though by no means did all of the
Iraqis agree with the view of progress in Iraq.
The following exchange then occurred:
GG: Given that some of the claims in your Op-Ed are based upon your
conversations with Iraqis, and that the Iraqis with whom you spoke were
largely if not exclusively ones provided to you by the U.S. military,
shouldn’t that fact have been included in your Op-Ed? MO: If the suggestion is that in a 1,400 word Op-Ed, we
ought to have mentioned that, I can understand that criticism, and if
we should have included that, I apologize for not having done so.
But I want to stress that the focus here was on the perspective of the
U.S. military, and I did a lot of probing of what I was told, and
remain confident in the conclusions that we reached about the military
successes which we highlighted. But if you’re suggesting that some
of our impressions might have been shaped by the military’s selection
of Iraqis, and that we might have disclosed that, that is, I think,
fair enough.
Subsequently, I pressed him again on
how they could possibly rely on what they were hearing given that
virtually all of the vaunted “Iraqi military and civilian personnel”
with whom they were speaking were hand-picked for them. O’Hanlon
acknowledged:
I will take your point and I would agree
with your point that we were certainly not getting a representative
view of Iraqi opinion.
Indeed, the great bulk of the
information on which this Op-Ed was based came from the U.S. military,
either directly or through the Iraqi “sources” provided to Pollack and
O’Hanlon, a fact which — though concealed in their Op-Ed and in their
interviews — O’Hanlon defended this way:
Now you could say in one sense all this data ultimately, all this information ultimately is coming from the U.S. military. Yes, but there’s an opportunity for a lot of probing, a lot of debate, a lot of conversations back and forth. . . .
Not only was this obviously critical fact –that “all this information
ultimately is coming from the U.S. military” — excluded from their
Op-Ed, but, with one exception, neither they nor their numerous media
interviewers saw fit to mention it. The only reference to it was a
fleeting one as a result of this commendable question from Wolf Blitzer
to Pollack during one of CNN’s several segments devoted to their “findings”:
BLITZER:
Was this part, though, of a U.S. military tour, if you will, that they
took you around, you were escorted from location to location to
location and they were the ones that took you to specific places? Or
did you have the freedom to say I want to go here, I want to go there?
Who organized, in other words, the stopovers, the visits that you were
having? POLLACK: It was — largely this was — it was largely organized
by the military. We felt that was important because right now the big
story is the military story.
And
that was it. In their Op-Ed and countless media appearances, where they
constantly paraded around — and were held up — as first-hand
witnesses who had seen the Truth in Iraq with their very own eyes, that
was the only mention of this fact, a fact which rather obviously and
profoundly impacts the credibility of what they claimed to have
“discovered.”
* * * * *
Sweeping conclusions from 2-hour visits
But this only begins to convey how ludicrous and misleading a spectacle
this whole event was. O’Hanlon and Pollack were in Iraq for a total of
7 1/2 days. They spent every night ensconced in the Green Zone in
Baghdad. They did not spend a single night in any other city. As
O’Hanlon admitted, they spent no more than “between 2-4 hours” in every
place they visited outside Baghdad, and much of that was taken up
meeting U.S. military commanders, not inspecting the proverbial
“conditions on the ground.”
Yet in their Op-Ed, they purported to describe the encouraging
conditions in four places other than Baghdad — Ramadi, Tal Afar,
Mosul, and the Anbar Province — as though they could possibly have
made any meaningful observations during their visits which were all
roughly the duration of the average airport layover. Worse, both
O’Hanlon and Pollack — and especially Pollack — in their interviews
repeatedly described their optimistic observations about Iraqi cities
in such a way as to create the misleading impression that these were
based upon their first-hand observations.
Here, for instance, is Pollack on NPR
purporting to describe the Great Progress in Mosul as though he is some
grizzled war reporter who has witnessed the conditions “on the ground”
there — a place in which, O’Hanlon acknowledged to me by e-mail, they
spent a grand total of 2 hours:
The most
obvious change we saw was in the security sector, where in Northern,
Central and Western Iraq, there was improvement. It varied very widely.
It was uneven. But in some places, it was really striking.My last trip to Iraq was at the end of 2005, and I was up by Mosul. And
I gotta tell you, Mosul was a disaster. It was completely out of
control, and we had tens of thousand of American troops up in Mosul
trying desperately to keep that place together.Well, this trip, we went up to Mosul, and found that there are only
several hundred American troops up there. And the reason for that is we
now finally have some Iraqi army divisions that are rising to the
occasion. We got two divisions up there — an Army Division and a
Police Division — which are both capable and reliable. And that’s
allowed the military to greatly scale back their commitment to Iraq’s
third largest city, to the point where they are simply providing
advisory teams and fire support teams, and the Iraqis are doing the
work . . . . That is such a dramatic change.
And here is what Pollack told Tucker Carlson on MSNBC:
In addition, what was most striking to me — because the last time I
was in Iraq was about 18 months ago in late 2005, and I was over there
looking at Iraqi army formations — and frankly, they were all awful [GG: that was the same exact time when Gen. Petraues was proclaiming “very substantial momentum” and “huge progress” in Iraqi troop readiness]. This time around, the Iraqi army formations are really starting to step up to the plate. And we have a number — I won’t say the whole army, not even the
majority of it — but there are a number of divisions and brigades and
battalions that are really proving to be able partners of the U.S., to
the extent that in some parts of Iraq, particularly Mosul, Tal Afar,
some other parts, areas south of Baghdad, the Iraqis really are taking
the lead and the U.S. forces are really just supporting them.
Any
reasonable person would conclude that Pollack is describing progress
based upon first-hand observations made during his “visit to Mosul” —
a completely deceitful impression in light of the reality of this trip.
Indeed, the overarching narrative for every interview was that they had
“just returned from Iraq” and were excited by what they saw.
Yet they inspected virtually nothing in these cities, and everything
with regard to “Iraqi troop readiness” — which Pollack excitedly
touted in hailing the “dramatic progress” in Mosul and elsewhere — was
all based on what they were told by the U.S. military or its
hand-picked sources. As O’Hanlon said:
GG: What I’m trying to get at is if they told you, for instance, that
there were certain army divisions in Mosul where the bad commanders
were being weeded out and they were now capable of holding
neighborhoods better, you wouldn’t actually go to the neighborhoods and
inspect whether or not what you were told was true. Your claims in
that regard in the Op-Ed were based upon your belief that what the U.S.
military commanders were telling you was accurate. Is that true?MO: Yes, that’s true. Based on that example, on that type of example, you’re right.
The day before I interviewed O’Hanlon, The New Yorker‘s George Packer spoke with Pollack and reported that Pollack “spoke with very few Iraqis and could independently confirm very little of what he heard from American officials.”
To Packer, Pollack also confirmed that the flamboyant claims about
Iraqi troops readiness “came from American military sources.”
* * * * *
Severe sloppiness or bad faith?
With the possible exception of their observations about U.S. troop
morale and the McCain-like claims about the isolated, peaceful strolls
they were led on by the military, Pollack and O’Hanlon could have just
as easily stayed at home, spoken on the telephone with U.S. military
commanders, written down what they said, and then “reported” everything
exactly as they did in their Op-Ed. The trip to Iraq part was just a
prop in the argument, something to bestow unwarranted and artificial
credibility on their war cheerleading claims.
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.
After all, the whole premise of the Op-Ed is that they have credibility
to speak about the Progress in Iraq because they just returned from a
trip there and because they are “two analysts who have harshly
criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq.”
Indeed, they used the very first sentence to create the misleading
impression that they were offering first-hand accounts of the purported
progress, rather than simply relying upon claims of the U.S. military.
Moreover, they not only acquiesced to the fraud that they are “critics
of the administration,” they actively propagated it in order to lend
their claims credibility they did not deserve. Here, as but one
example, is Michael O’Hanlon’s description of himself on Hardball: “I have been a critic of the administration all along.” That is nothing short of an outright falsehood.
But far more importantly, they had to have known beforehand that they
were going to get a highly unrepresentative picture of Iraq by having
the U.S. military shape their itinerary from start to finish and
hand-pick virtually everyone with whom they would speak. That is just
so obvious. And yet when I asked O’Hanlon about this, he acted as
though this had never occurred to him before.
It’s one thing for political hacks like Joe Lieberman or John McCain to go on these contrived missions — trips aptly derided on Meet the Press by Jim Webb in explaining why he has never gone:
Sen. Graham: “Have you been to Iraq and talked to the soldiers?”
Sen. Webb: “You know, you haven’t been to Iraq, Lindsey. (cross-talk). You go see the dog and pony show. That’s what Congressman do.”
But
Pollack/O’Hanlon are “scholars” — people whose claims are supposed to
be immune from political pressures and who reside above the political
fray. Ask them and they will be happy to tell you that. Here is Ken
Pollack with Tucker Carlson, snidely dismissing the notion that he has
anything other than the purest of aims:
And you know, I am
going to go out there and I am going to say what I have to say. I’ve
been doing this my entire life. I say exactly what I think is the right
answer. I don’t care about politics.
Pollack’s deeply apolitical superiority did not, however, prevent him from issuing this decree at the Council on Foreign Relations last week:
Q.
The Democratic candidates have been fighting among themselves over what
to do. Your advice to the Democrats is what, to cool it until the
election? Pollack: Certainly to cool it until early 2008.
Whatever
it means to be a “scholar,” it ought to include at the very minimum a
refusal to ground one’s “scholarly” conclusions in data that is plainly
biased, politically motivated, and worthy of extreme skepticism. Yet —
while O’Hanlon sheepishly admits being fooled about Iraq’s WMD and
repeatedly insisted that he has learned lessons — they go on an Iraq
“fact-finding trip” and then come back and flamboyantly trumpet
extraordinary claims based on very little other than the unverified
assertions of the U.S. military. And they never bother to disclose any
of that. Whatever that is, it is not the behavior of apolitical
“scholars.”
[The above-the-political-fray Pollack is employed by the “Saban Center for Middle East Studies”
at Brookings — so named because it is funded with many millions of
dollars by billionaire Haim Saban, an Israeli-American neoconservative
who was a 2004 supporter of George Bush,
was a close associate of Ariel Sharon, and spent the 1990s persuading
Bill Clinton (with millions of dollars in donations to the Democratic
Party) to be more supportive of Israel.
In a 2004 glowing profile, the NYT
described Saban as “throwing his weight and money around Washington
and, increasingly, the world, trying to influence all things Israeli,”
and in that article, Saban told the NYT: “I’m a one-issue guy
and my issue is Israel.” The profile also reported: “While Mr. Saban is
a vocal opponent of President Bush — ‘I think Bush is just messing it
up every day more’ — he supports some of Mr. Bush’s policies. ‘On the issues of security and terrorism I am a total hawk.'”
In essence, Saban is Marty Peretz but with money that he earned
himself. That is who backs Ken Pollack’s presumably large paychecks and
funds his Brookings war “scholarship”].
O’Hanlon and Pollack appeared on at least 10 major television news
programs. Other than Blitzer, no interviewer even raised the issue of
whether they were overly-dependent on the U.S. military for their
information, none probed the basis for their claims, and Pollack and
O’Hanlon never once even alluded to the questionable nature of what
they had been shown (even though O’Hanlon “apologized” for not
disclosing it in the Op-Ed when I pressed him on it). And from what I
reviewed, not a single one ever identified either of them as having
been pro-war and pro-Surge, and they themselves never bothered to
mention that as they were hailed as hard-nosed “critics” of the
administration — thus helpfully preserving the dramatic television
storyline that “harsh critic of the Bush administration” went to Iraq
and found Great Progress.
These interviewers just all stood by, excited and oozing
enthusiasm, as Pollack and O’Hanlon lavished tales on the country of
the grand and glorious progress we are finally making in Iraq. The host
on the very-very-liberal NPR began the Pollack interview by gushing:
“If you’ve been searching the papers for good news from Iraq, we found
a little on the Op-Ed pages!” Vapid, mindless and absurd.
After all this time, and everything that has happened under the Bush presidency, nothing has changed. Michael Gordon and the NYT
continue to publish one war-fueling story after the next on its front
page based on nothing other than the unverified claims of government
and military officials. Our “journalists” do not have even an iota of
instinct to question or probe anything they hear from our war-mongering
Serious Experts and Serious Political Leaders.
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