It is important that Senator Obama hear from centrists on Iraq, and Susan [Rice] may not be such a person on that subject. As such, given Iraq’s relative importance, it is crucial that in addition to military officers with responsibility for the operation there, at least one key member of the cabinet not be firmly wed to Senator Obama’s ill-advised proposal for a firm and rapid withdrawal schedule from Iraq over the coming 16 to 18 months.

O’HANLON: But let’s also be fair. Iraq now seems to be a quasi-functioning democracy, without weapons of mass destruction, without genocides against its own citizens or attacks against its neighbors. So, to some extent, we’ve got to give the president his due.

Watch it:

Note to O’Hanlon: The fact that Iraq didn’t have WMD is what made Bush’s invasion of Iraq “deliberately cavalier.”

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“To say you’re going to get out on a certain schedule — regardless of what the Iraqis do, regardless of what our enemies do, regardless of what is happening on the ground — is the height of absurdity,” said O’Hanlon, who described himself as “livid.” “I’m not going to go to the next level of invective and say he shouldn’t be president. I’ll leave that to someone else.”

In 2004, however, O’Hanlon’s sentiments were strikingly similar to Obama’s. In an op-ed titled “Set a date to pull out,” O’Hanlon wrote that “our own enduring commitment to success in Iraq is beginning to work against us.” “Some will see this as cut-and-run,” he said. “It is not.”

Last week, Brookings Institution analyst Michael O’Hanlon complained to the New York Times that he is a perfect example of the media’s declining interest in Iraq, as he hardly receives Iraq interview requests anymore:

“I was getting on average three to five calls a day for interviews about the war” in the first years, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution. “Now it’s less than one a day.“

On its “This Week in Politics” segment on Saturday, CNN took pity on poor O’Hanlon. Host Tom Foreman said they decided to call O’Hanlon not because he was the most qualified, but because they heard his cries for attention:

In Monday’s “New York Times,” Brookings scholar Michael O’Hanlon was quoted as saying that the number of journalists calling him for stories on Iraq has fallen off to zero. So, we gave Michael a call and invited him to tell us why voters continue to care about Iraq. And we called in CNN’s Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr to keep him honest.

Watch it:

While O’Hanlon blames the press for his decreasing number of interviews, there is another possibility: his authority on Iraq has declined, as he has repeatedly and inextricably linked himself to Bush’s Iraq policies.

The media refuse to abandon these discredited pundits completely though. As the National Security Network’s Ilan Goldenberg observes, O’Hanlon has had “13 pieces in four of the most influential op-ed pages in the country over the past 7 months. … Unless you are a cabinet level position or higher, nobody deserves this type of representation.”

The Center for American Progress’s Eric Alterman and George Zornick also add, “Most of the pundits asked to look back on the first six years of the war in mainstream organs like The New York Times op-ed page and the online magazine, Slate, were people who got the decision wrong in the first place.”

(HT: Heather)

Transcript:

FOREMAN: For all of the talk about how the candidates are battling for the White House, real battles with real bullets are raging across Iraq this week, and when General David Petraeus makes his report to Congress next month, that situation in Iraq could turn this campaign upside down again. Iraq has been out of the news spotlight lately.

In Monday’s “New York Times,” Brookings scholar Michael O’Hanlon was quoted as saying that the number of journalists calling him for stories on Iraq has fallen off to zero. So, we gave Michael a call and invited him to tell us why voters continue to care about Iraq. And we called in CNN’s Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr to keep him honest.

Michael, let me ask you this first off, when General Petraeus shows up next month, all the campaigns say they want to listen to the general, is he going to say what they want to hear?

MICHAEL O’HANLON, BROOKINGS INSITUTION: Hi, Tom. Well, I think they we don’t know what he’s going to say because of the developments that you just alluded to that are ongoing in Iraq right now. This is a fundamentally different kind of situation than we’ve had in a long time and the outcome could be net very good or net very bad. There are some people trying to prejudge. President Bush for example said this shows that the Iraqi government can be decisive, because they’re the ones who chose when to do to this operation and they are leading it.

I want to call them the Lombardis of this war. … And in addition to Fred and Ken who have been two of the most important people. Andy Krepinevich is another important think tanker. Retired Gen. Jack Keane from the outside. A small group of people inside the administration, smaller than it should have been, but people like Meghan O’Sullivan. [...]

These people did two things that I think would have made Vince Lombardi proud. One, they stuck with it, and they persevered through difficult times. And two, they stayed focused on fundamentals.

Watch it:

O’Hanlon, however, isn’t satisfied with his op-ed presence, complaining today that he is a perfect example of the media’s declining interest in Iraq, as he hardly receives Iraq interview requests anymore:

“I was getting on average three to five calls a day for interviews about the war” in the first years, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution. “Now it’s less than one a day.”

While O’Hanlon blames the press for his decreased interviews, there is another possibility: his authority on Iraq has declined, as he has repeatedly and inextricably linked himself to Bush’s Iraq policies.

So when O’Hanlon does get the occasional interview, what can we expect to see? On the Today Show this morning, O’Hanlon appeared dismissive of the implications of the 4,000 U.S. troop death milestone in Iraq:

It’s not going to be seen as a major symbolic plateau or threshold or new milestone. It’s just going to be another reminder of the grim toll of war.

Watch it:

With comments like this, the media’s declining interest in interviewing O’Hanlon seems more like a positive development.

“I’m troubled about what they both say about Iraq. He’s the one who wants to get out very fast, unconditionally, and to some extent, he’s pulled her along,” Mr. O’Hanlon said. [...]

“Still, if you add up all of their differences, they both fail on Iraq. They both would get out very fast. They both are advocating a policy that unless significantly modified would lead to a reversal of our military progress in 2007,” he said.

While there have been significant reductions in violence over the past year in Iraq, “progress” in Baghdad is relative to the “pure hell” of 2006. The International Crisis Group warned in a new report that the existing ceasefire among Iraq’s ethnic groups is “exceedingly frail.” And U.S. casualties have begun to increase, rising to the highest levels in the past four months.

Absent from this Washington Times article, of course, is how often O’Hanlon himself has failed on Iraq. In 2004, he favored a timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq because, in his words, occupation “breeds cynicism among Iraqis that we are like the colonialists of old, planning to stay indefinitely.”

Since then, however, O’Hanlon has not only supported Bush’s so-called troop “surge,” but he has also advocated for a long-term occupation of Iraq. And he has repeatedly provided cover for the administration’s failing policy:

– “There are good reasons to give the war effort, now almost four years old, another six to nine months before concluding that the current strategy should be discarded and a much different on.” [03/01/07]

– “It’s basically saying nothing more dramatic than give it six more months or so, maybe nine more months.” [08/05/07]

– “But I think this is a very complex subject and could easily see myself changing camps in the next six to nine months.” [09/13/07]

O’Hanlon’s latest “six month” deadline to change his position on Iraq is set to expire next month — at which point he will likely blame someone else for failure.

Over the next few years, the Bush administration had no formal Iran policy, and only recently embraced high-level talks with Iran to discuss the future course of Iraq. But even as it has slowly embraced engagement with Iran, the White House’s policy has been marked by war-mongering threats.

The National Intelligence Estimate revealed that the White House was trumpeting false threats about Iran’s nuclear program. Most recently, the administration has resorted to fear-mongering over the alleged “provocative and dramatic” encounter between five Iranian speedboats and three major U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz. For all this, Brookings “scholar” Michael O’Hanlon awards the Bush administration a “gentleman’s B” for its handling of Iran:

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said he was not convinced Bush should be blamed for failure with Iran.

He said the Bush administration has done a “reasonable job” supporting European diplomacy and gradually tightening sanctions “as hard as it is to get Russia and China along.”

“It has not been a dramatic failure,” O’Hanlon said in an interview. “I would give him a gentleman’s B.”

O’Hanlon doesn’t stop there with his praise for Bush’s foreign policy. In an op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Times, he gave the recent de-Baathification reform a “grade of B+.” Recall, those reforms passed by the Iraqi parliament “could actually exclude more former Baathists than it lets back in.” The Washington Post reports the “law could set off a new purge of ex-Baathists.”

It’s no surprise that O’Hanlon is eager to show his affinity for President Bush. What is surprising is that he restrained himself from giving the President straight As.

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The full surge has been in place and operating for just over six months, and already violence has fallen dramatically across the country. The achievement in such a short time of significant legislation that requires all sides to accept risk and compromise with people they had been fighting only a few months ago is remarkable. It would have been unattainable without the change in strategy and addition of American forces that helped bring the violence down.

The authors pass off the bill’s problems by noting that the “legislation is imperfect, of course.” But many Sunni and Shiite officials have stated that the bill “could actually exclude more former Baathists than it lets back in, particularly in the crucial security ministries.” In fact, as Middle East expert Juan Cole has noted, the legislation was actually spearheaded by the most anti-Baathist groups and opposed by former Baathists.

Keane, Kagan, and O’Hanlon don’t let these concerns interfere with their sunny assessment, however, briefly writing that this “possible problem” will need to be “cleared up.” Last week, Kagan compared the bill to “the beginning of their [Iraqi] civil rights legislation.”

What does all this “good news” mean? According to the three armchair generals, it means that U.S. troops should stay in Iraq as long as possible, despite the recommendations of U.S. commanders:

Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno know the strains the surge has placed on the military and believe that we can reduce our forces to pre-surge levels by this summer without compromising our gains. Considering the big steps taken by Iraqi security forces over the past year, as well as the tremendous damage our forces and Iraqi forces, together with the Iraqi people, have done to al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni Baathist insurgency, Iranian-backed special groups and the fighting elements of the Jaish al-Mahdi, this belief is probably justified. But we cannot be sure.

Absent from the online version — but present in the print edition — is the authors’ call to “plan to stay heavily engaged in Iraq for several more years.”

While Keane, Kagan, and O’Hanlon herald the Bush administration’s “ongoing engagement,” it’s important to remember that President Bush’s former appointee Paul Bremer was responsible for de-Baathification in the first place. In 2003, Bremer issued a sweeping order that outlawed Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and dismissed all senior members from government posts. (This point is acknowledged in the online version of the op-ed, but is notably absent from the print version.)

UPDATE: Boston University professor Andrew J. Bacevich also writes an op-ed entitled “Surge to Nowhere” today in the Post: “In only one respect has the surge achieved undeniable success: It has ensured that U.S. troops won’t be coming home anytime soon. This was one of the main points of the exercise in the first place.”

UPDATE II: The Group News Blog has more on how the surge is supposedly “working.”

It is puzzling why newspapers print O’Hanlon’s analysis, since he’s been repeatedly wrong in staking out his inconsistent and often incoherent positions on Iraq. As Think Progress has previously noted, O’Hanlon’s record on Iraq policy for the past five years has been radically uneven — at one point in 2004, supporting a timeline for withdrawing troops, and at other points arguing for staying the course for years to come.

Angling for influence is nothing new for O’Hanlon, who tried to position himself in the policy and political debates by in 2004 by criticizing Howard Dean and throughout the past year with proponents for change in Iraq like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

In this electoral year’s article from O’Hanlon, he outlines what he sees as two main problems with Obama’s Iraq position:

1. O’HANLON: “[Obama] seems contemptuous of the motivations of those who supported the war.”

O’Hanlon offers up a thinly-veiled defense for analysts like himself who offered tragically wrong advice in the war in March 2003 — O’Hanlon cannot seem to face up to the fact that he lined up on the wrong side of the arguments on Iraq, and America has suffered serious damage to its national security as a result.

O’Hanlon argued against the war at certain points in 2002 and even outlined a long list of preconditions before going to war in a policy paper he co-published called “Getting Serious About Iraq” (most of these conditions were not met). But then he forgot many of his own arguments and naively accepted the information and arguments presented by the Bush administration on the eve of the war. (He said about Bush’s case for war in the 2003 State of the Union address the president was “convincing on his central point that the time of war is near.”)

It may be that people are contemptuous of those who posture and profess to offer expertise on the right path forward on Iraq like O’Hanlon does, even though their track record is awful. In most professions, there are consequences for bad performance. Doctors face the threat of medical malpractice suits; policy analysts like O’Hanlon get to make mistakes again and again with impunity, as do journalists who quote him and publish his pieces.

2. O’HANLON: “Obama’s second Iraq problem is his insistence that, whatever happens there during 2008, he would withdraw all our main combat forces in the first 16 months of his presidency.”

Here O’Hanlon again offers bad advice and displays his unwillingness to recognize the Bush surge in Iraq has failed to achieve its fundamental goal — to advance political reconciliation among Iraq’s leaders. It’s a good thing that fewer Iraqis are dying, but Iraq’s leaders are no closer to a political settlement, which was the point of the surge. Unless Iraq’s leaders strike the power-sharing deals necessary to stabilize their country, the drop in violence is not likely to be sustainable. O’Hanlon favors fostering the dangerous and dysfunctional culture of dependency among Iraq’s leaders that comes with his proposals to keep U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely.

O’Hanlon’s solution? Divide up the country into something he calls a “soft partition,” something that the vast majority of Iraqis oppose. O’Hanlon’s recommendations include a long-term U.S. troop presence, something the vast majority of Americans oppose.

Instead of printing O’Hanlon’s attempts to remain relevant in the Iraq debate, Americans should continue listening to those pushing for change, whether it includes conservatives like Ron Paul or progressives like Obama, Edwards, and Clinton. They should also check out the Center’s Strategic Reset plan, which outlines a comprehensive approach for using the full range of America’s powers to stabilize Iraq and the Middle East, centered on a phased redeployment of U.S. troops in 12 to 18 months and intensified diplomatic efforts in the Middle East.

– Brian Katulis

Full disclosure: Katulis has formally endorsed Obama.

[T]he United States simply could not stand by as a nuclear-armed Pakistan descended into the abyss. … We need to think — now — about our feasible military options in Pakistan, should it really come to that. … Pakistan may be the next big test.

As the “intellectual architect” of the Iraq “surge,” Kagan (who also advocates war with Syria and Iran) was personally invited by the White House to help “hammer out” the escalation strategy last year. O’Hanlon has backed war with Iraq since 2002 and is a chief proponent of a long-term occupation of Iraq.

In the op-ed, they recommend the use of Special Forces to secure the nukes, or a “broader option” requiring “a sizable combat force.” “Somehow, American forces would have to team with Pakistanis to secure critical sites and possibly to move the material to a safer place,” they write. “Moderate Muslim nations” would join the U.S. in organizing a combat force in Pakistan.

The duo claims it is not “strategically prudent to withdraw our forces from an improving situation in Iraq” to implement these plans. But such a plan would eviscerate the “out of balance” U.S. military, according to Gen. George Casey. The National Security Network adds:

Kagan and O’Hanlon clearly have a hidden stash of U.S. soldiers. Even if you were sending “just” 40,000-50,000, our military could not sustain that operation without taking our troops out of Iraq.

O’Hanlon and Kagan’s strategy depends on cooperation from Pakistan and “moderate Muslim nations,” but such cooperation is unlikely as President Bush’s approval rating in Pakistan is currently at nine percent and at similar levels across the Muslim world.

The White House said in July that it would consider strikes against al Qaeda in Pakistan, which drew “a chorus of protests in Pakistan” and caused greater instability. No matter the consequences, the military option is always on the table for O’Hanlon and Kagan.

Fox highlighted the fact that O’Hanlon has enjoyed a 20-year personal relationship with Petraeus, extending back to graduate school. As ThinkProgress noted, this relationship leaves doubt about O’Hanlon’s ability to impartially assess Petraeus’s performance.

Yesterday, O’Hanlon escalated his obsessive defense of Petraeus, attacking the Pentagon because its statistics differed than those of his grad school buddy. In a Washington Times op-ed, O’Hanlon acknowledged that the Pentagon’s recent report “clouded” Petraeus’ report:

The latest confusion has arisen from the Pentagon’s own published reports and cannot be blamed on the media or anyone else [...]

My examination of the data convinces me Gen. Petraeus and his team in Baghdad have it right, and that the Pentagon needs to re-evaluate how it is assessing and presenting data.

O’Hanlon’s argument focuses on making the case for cherry-picking facts, or selecting what he personally thinks should and should not be included in a tally of violence:

I am less persuaded of the importance of tracking ethno-sectarian killings, where Gen. Petraeus’ data show even more improvement. While somewhat useful as a metric, they are also somewhat hard to define.

He also asserts that one should not focus on tallying wounded Iraqis, criticizing the Pentagon “for some reason focus[ing] on all casualties, including killed and wounded.” “Data on wounded probably also are ‘softer‘ than data on killings,” O’Hanlon alleges.

O’Hanlon has acquired a keen ability to make his conclusions fit his personal beliefs. In his infamous New York Times op-ed, he contradicted his own research to portray the escalation as successful. His attack on the Pentagon yesterday reflects how he is continuing to marginalize his own credibility in the foreign policy community.

We can always rely on Michael O’Hanlon to fix the facts around the policy to defend his good friend.

One of the most prominent interviewees was Brookings Institution analyst Michael O’Hanlon. Fox highlighted the fact that O’Hanlon has enjoyed a 20-year personal relationship with the general, extending back to graduate school:

O’HANLON: Petreaus certainly was distinctive and noteworthy.

FOX: Michael O’Hanlon is with the Brookings Institution. And in 1987, he attended Princeton with Petraeus. [...]

O’HANLON: Petraeus was trying to learn lessons [from Vietnam], so that with humility, and a willingness to do things differently, then next time, the military could stay out of that predicament. So that’s Petraeus’s style. He is very self-critical of himself and the institutions that he represents.

Watch it:

In his notorious New York Times op-ed, O’Hanlon did not mention the friendship but called Petraeus a “superb commander.” In subsequent interviews, he again glossed over his long relationship with Petraeus. In a Washington Post story entitled “The Work Behind Our Iraq Views,” O’Hanlon did not state that the work behind his Iraq views may be biased by his friendship with Petraeus.

The traditional media has regularly hosted O’Hanlon but has also ignored O’Hanlon’s inability to assess Petraeus’s work in an unbiased manner, choosing instead to call him a “vocal critic” of the war.

O’Hanlon has alleged that no one can question the “forthrightness” of Petraeus and has since attacked reputable critics of Petraeus as “flat-out sloppy.” Both the mainstream media as well as O’Hanlon have ignored the possibility that his judgment of Iraq may be clouded by his friendship and deep-admiration for Petraeus.

If you think there’s hope [in Iraq], there’s a very powerful argument in favor of trying to see what we can build on, what battle field successes at least we may have had this summer or this year so far. … But I think this is a very complex subject and could easily see myself changing camps in the next six to nine months.

Watch it:

Isolated within his own community due to his obsessive flacking for Bush, O’Hanlon has no credibility in making predictions. Some lowlights:

March 2003: “Here’s why things are going well and why they will soon go even better.”

May 2004: “Set a date to pull out.”

November 2005: “[T]he military appears as confident as ever of ultimate victory.”

December 2006: “Give it six more months or so, maybe nine more months.”

March 2007: “There are good reasons to give the war effort, now almost four years old, another six to nine months before concluding that the current strategy should be discarded.”

O’Hanlon’s moment of accountability is always six months away.

The Washington Post reports today that national security analysts are questioning the military’s statistics. National Intelligence Estimate authors, Iraq Study Group members, intelligence officials, and academics now “accuse the military of cherry-picking positive indicators.”

Brookings analyst Michael O’Hanlon, however, attacked the GAO, choosing instead to laud the Pentagon’s distortions. In an analysis only he could offer, O’Hanlon rips the GAO report for being both “overly rigorous” and “flat-out sloppy”:

During his recent tour through Iraq, [O'Hanlon] adds, every local briefing he received from the US military said that attacks in that particular sector were down. In addition, for the GAO to decline to judge whether attacks are sectarian or not is to take an overly rigorous approach to the numbers, says the Brookings expert.

“I just think they were flat-out sloppy,” he says of GAO.

By attacking the GAO, O’Hanlon has defied the community of national security experts he alleges to be a part of and has instead allied himself with the discredited ranks of the Bush administration and right-wing lawmakers.

Ironically, while O’Hanlon bashes the GAO when he doesn’t like what it says, his very own Iraq Index borrows heavily from GAO reports:

A senior military intelligence official attributed the Pentagon’s drastic reduction in violence “to a desire to provide Petraeus with ammunition for his congressional testimony.” O’Hanlon’s desire to provide that ammunition has left him in lonely territory in Washington.

Viewed from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

This weekend, seven soldiers of the 82nd Airborne responded in kind:

Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. … As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day.

This morning, O’Hanlon appeared on The Diane Rehm Show to discuss the situation in Iraq. Asked to comment on the op-ed written by the soldiers, O’Hanlon said, “They may have even been taking a slight poke at us as we used a similar term in an op-ed three weeks earlier.” Indeed.

O’Hanlon went on to argue that, while he “read that op-ed very carefully” and has “great respect” for the soldiers, he had to “get a few simple facts on the table” that suggested the soldiers didn’t understand the full picture. O’Hanlon claimed “civilian fatalities are down by a third,” and “we’re on the tactical offensive.”

Listen to a portion of the interview here:

Here’s a “simple fact” O’Hanlon neglected. Statistics compiled by O’Hanlon’s Brookings Institution Iraq index (see p. 18) demonstrate this summer is the bloodiest summer of the entire Iraq war:

June-July-August 2003: 113 Americans killed
June-July-August 2004: 162 Americans killed
June-July-August 2005: 217 Americans killed
June-July-August 2006: 169 Americans killed
June-July-August 2007: 229 Americans killed so far

Center for American Progress military analyst Lawrence Korb — who also appeared on the Rehm show — cautioned O’Hanlon against dismissing the soldiers’ arguments. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “From my own days in the military, pay attention to the enlisted people. The officers — and I was an officer and I went through Vietnam — would always try to put out a rosy scenario to please the political masses. What these young people are saying is look, you can’t win no matter what you do.”

UPDATE: McClatchy reported recently that its statistics don’t support the claim that Iraqi civilian casualties have fallen dramatically.

Stewart pressed Kristol on why actual skeptics of the war should trust war hawks such as him “to undo the terrible thing” they created by pushing for the invasion of Iraq and making failed predictions at every turn. “Don’t trust me,” responded Kristol. “Trust skeptics of the war like Mike O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack.”

“They weren’t really skeptics,” Stewart said. “Ken Pollack would like us to invade Iran, for God’s sake…those are very hawkish guys.” Watch it:

By challenging Kristol, Stewart has done something that most mainstream news outlets have failed to do, which is correctly label O’Hanlon and Pollack as hawks who supported both the initial invasion of Iraq and the President’s escalation strategy. Much of the mainstream media has referred to the two as “vocal critics” of the Bush administration.

Even though O’Hanlon has admitted that he “was not a critic of this war,” his and Pollack’s op-ed has enabled pro-war hawks like Kristol and Vice President Cheney to claim validation for their opinions from alleged critics. By labeling O’Hanlon and Pollack as critics, the media is giving political cover to the same voices who misguidedly pushed America into war in the first place.

UPDATE: During the interview, Kristol also said “it’s not a bad idea” to invade Iran and that Americans should let Iraq “play…out for the next six months.”