Everybody has already taken their whacks at today's Times Op ed by Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, which argued that we "just might win" the war and that the political debate in Washington is "surreal" and out of touch with the progress being made there.
But here's an amusing postscript to this whole saga. It turns out that this assessment by O'Hanlon today is in some key ways strikingly at odds with...
...the Brookings Institution's own Iraq Index, a meticulous and regularly updated compilation of stats designed to paint as realistic a portrait as possible of the situation on the ground.
And guess who oversees the Brookings Iraq Index?
Yup -- it's overseen by Michael O'Hanlon.
Via Steve Benen. And also via Steve, Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution gives us two Pollack quotes -- the first from the op-ed in today's NYT, and the second from his pre-Iraq war book, The Threatening Storm. Here's the second quote:
Saddam has a twenty-eight year pattern of aggression, violence, miscalculation, and purposeful underestimation of the consequences of his actions that should give real pause to anyone...
Even when Saddam does consider a problem at length...his own determination to interpret geopolitical calculations to suit what he wants to believe anyway lead him to construct bizarre scenarios that he convinces himself are highly likely.
And Jonathan's brilliant post title: "Men Who Wear Red Shirts Are Crazy And Dangerous," Said The Man In The Red Shirt.
