Michael O'Hanlon offers this rebuttal to the charges from the moonbatosphere (led by our favorite multi-sock puppet Glenn Greenwald) that O'Hanlon is just a useful idiot of the administration.
Unfortunately, much of the blogosphere and other media outlets have emphasized the wrong question, challenging the integrity of anyone who dares to express politically incorrect views about Iraq. Last week, Jonathan Finer criticized on this page [" Green Zone Blinders," Aug. 18] a New York Times essay that Ken Pollack and I wrote, as well as the comments of several senators, for claiming too much insight based on short trips to Iraq. Finer suggested that we did not leave the Green Zone, although we frequently did, on this and other trips, and he ignored how critical Pollack and I have been of administration policy in the past.
Worse, Finer and critics such as Rep. Jack Murtha and Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald have suggested that our analyses are based on a few days of military "dog-and-pony shows." Our assessments are based on our observations as well as on years of study. That experience creates networks of colleagues such as military officers whose off-the-record insights can inform ours and who in the past have often told us when they did not think their strategies were working or could work. While hardly making us infallible, this also led each of us to oppose predictions of a "cakewalk" before the invasion and to join Gen. Eric Shinseki in criticizing invasion plans that had too few troops and too little thought given to the post-invasion mission.
O'Hanlon does a good job of laying out the positives and negatives of our current situation in Iraq. This is precisely the same impression I got of his earlier column: that the situation in Iraq has improved but there's still a lot of work, particularly political work, to be done before we can declare victory.
It seems like absolute nonsense that so many on the Left cling so tightly to the idea of defeat and seem to be so unwilling to even contemplate the idea of success. These self-same critics scream that we shouldn't question their patriotism, even as they display repeatedly their dogged determination to find an empty glass where there might be a half-full one.
This isn't to say that our policies in Iraq do not deserve criticism. They do. But there's a distinct difference between having a jaundiced eye and having a partisan one. Considering that more than a couple of Congressmen have come back from Iraq saying many of the same things O'Hanlon has, it's hard to explain the rigid opposition by certain Lefties. Unless, of course, they really don't want us to win.
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