Brian Palmer, The Huffington Post, August 18, 2007
“We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms,” Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon wrote in their now famous July 30, 2007, New York Times opinion piece.
“Today, morale is high,” they continued. They spent all of eight days in country.
The writers, former Iraq war supporters turned quasicritics, took in the sights of Tal Afar, Mosul, Baghdad, and Ramadi. They share no information about how they managed to crisscross wartorn Iraq, nothing about the US combat power that would have been diverted to protect them on their walkabouts in places like Ramadi, where “last week we strolled down its streets without body armor,” they write.
Blogger Glenn Greenwald later elicited details from O’Hanlon about their Iraq summer vacation.
“What was the longest you stayed in any one place?” Greenwald asked O’Hanlon.
“Well, we spent each evening in Baghdad,” O’ Hanlon replied, “and we spent a number of days in Baghdad talking to different people…. Most of the other places we were anywhere from 2-4 hours.” Two to four hours. That’s a detail worth mentioning when making grand strategic assessments about a place as volatile as Iraq.