Glenn Greenwald on O'Hanlon and Pollack of the Brookings Institution

Glenn Greenwald - Political Blogs and Opinions - Salon: 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...

Comments

[Jeff]

They were observing "conditions on the ground which was underneath the feet of their military handlers." The quotation was badly edited.