[R-G] How Iraq War Backers Morphed Into "Critics"

[Anthony Fenton]

  How Iraq War Backers Morphed Into "Critics"
Analysis by Khody Akhavi
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39006

WASHINGTON, Aug 24 (IPS) - Sep. 15 is the deadline for the George W.  
Bush administration to submit a report to Congress defending its Iraq  
"surge strategy", an escalation of more than 30,000 U.S. troops  
designed to increase security in the war-torn nation.

Amidst the gruesome attacks that continue to plague Iraqis -- the  
casualty toll of last week's bombing in a poor rural area near the  
Syrian border has soared to more than 500, making it the bloodiest  
coordinated attack since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 -- and the  
crumbling political alliances and Sunni defections within Nouri al- 
Maliki's floundering government, the White House is hoping to bookend  
the latest chapter in the Iraq war debacle with some good news.

As usual, the Bush administration has been getting by with a little  
help -- perhaps unwittingly -- from its friends in the U.S.  
mainstream media.

The most recent "information surge" to pulsate through U.S. broadcast  
news outlets originated from the pens of Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth  
Pollack, two self-described critics of the administration's  
"miserable handling of Iraq", who, in a Jul. 30 New York Times Op-Ed  
entitled "A War We Just Might Win", wrote that "We [the U.S. forces]  
are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms."

O'Hanlon and Pollack, who also work as fellows at the Brookings  
Institution's Saban Centre for Middle East Policy, a Washington-based  
think-tank, were careful not to acknowledge the possibility of  
"victory in Iraq" -- an oft-used phrase that, along with "stay the  
course," has been recently omitted from President Bush's rhetoric.  
But they wrote that they were heartened by the morale of U.S. troops,  
surprised at the gains made by the "surge", and confident in its  
potential to produce a "sustainable stability that both we and the  
Iraqis could live with."

"There is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today  
that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into  
2008," they concluded. In doing so, O'Hanlon and Pollack jump-started  
an information surge that would end up providing political cover for  
the administration's war policy.

Mainstream media news outlets -- perhaps more out of complacence than  
collusion -- jumped on the bandwagon, reporting that two long-time  
critics of the Iraq war were conceding military progress, while  
ignoring the fact that both O'Hanlon and Pollack had initially been  
very vocal supporters of the war effort.

During a Jul. 30 interview on CNN Newsroom, anchor Heidi Collins  
painted Pollack as an opponent of the war who, based on his eight-day  
visit to Iraq, had ostensibly changed his mind and was becoming more  
supportive.

"You are a self-proclaimed critic of the way the Bush administration  
has handled this war, you wrote a book about the situation in Iraq,  
you shared your thoughts all over TV and in some newspapers, but yet  
it seems like the tune is changing a bit," she said.

Collins failed to mentioned the content of Pollack's 2002 book --  
"The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq" -- whose title  
speaks for itself, or that he heavily promoted the invasion of Iraq  
on the Oprah Winfrey show in 2002.

O'Hanlon and Pollack were similarly introduced over the next few days  
in interviews on major U.S. news channels. As noted by Media Matters,  
a media monitoring organisation based in Washington, on the Jul. 30  
edition of the CBS Evening News, national security correspondent  
David Martin incorrectly described O'Hanlon as "a critic" of the Iraq  
war "who used to think the surge was too little too late, [but] now  
believes it should be continued."

"In fact," Media Matters wrote, "while O'Hanlon has been critical of  
the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war, he supported the  
invasion and argued in January 2007 column that President Bush's  
troop increase was 'the right thing to try'."

One day after the Op-Ed was published, Vice President Dick Cheney  
appeared on CNN's Larry King Live and extolled O'Hanlon and Pollack's  
views, and attempted to add more credibility to the administration  
policy when he quipped that the Op-Ed had appeared in the New York  
Times, "not exactly a friendly publication".

"They have both been strong critics of the war, both worked in the  
prior administration; but now saying that they think there's a  
possibility, indeed, that we could be successful," Cheney told King.

Curiously, in 2002, the Bush administration fed false intelligence to  
the New York Times about nuclear weapons in Iraq, and Cheney quoted  
the story in an interview on Jim Russert's Meet the Press, part of  
similar strategy to place the burden of proof on a news source, not  
the administration.

Yet for all the complacence exhibited by CNN, FOX, ABC, CBS and other  
news outlets, the contradictions associated with O'Hanlon and  
Pollack's analysis were not lost on media watchdogs.

"For sheer deceit and propaganda, it is difficult to remember  
something quite this audacious and transparently false," wrote Glenn  
Greenwald of Salon.com "Witnessing these two war lovers -- supporters  
of the invasion, advocates of the surge, comrades of Fred Kagan --  
mindlessly depicted all day yesterday by media mouthpieces as the  
opposite of what they are was really quite startling."

Kagan, one of the architects of the surge strategy, accompanied  
neoconservative polemiscist Bill Kristol on his own tour of Iraq,  
which resulted in a laudatory evaluation of recent U.S. military  
efforts.

In an interview with Greenwald, O'Hanlon acknowledged that he was not  
exactly the Bush administration critic he was described as in  
numerous broadcast news interviews.

"That I'm being held up as a 'critic of the war', for example by Vice  
President Cheney, it's certainly fair to ask if that is a proper  
characterisation of me. And in fact I would not even use that  
characterisation of myself," O'Hanlon told Greenwald. "As you rightly  
reported, I was not a critic of this war. In the final analysis, I  
was a supporter."

Perhaps the most stinging rebuke of O'Hanlon and Pollack's tacit  
promotion of the surge strategy came in another New York Times Op-Ed  
published on Aug. 19.

In "The War as We See It", seven noncommissioned officers with the  
82nd Airborne Division at the tail-end of a 15-month deployment to  
Iraq wrote that "the claim that we are increasingly in control of the  
battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed,  
American-centred framework."

Without explicitly referring to the O'Hanlon and Pollack's op-ed, the  
seven authors echoed its language and challenged some of its claims.

"We are sceptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as  
increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil,  
political and social unrest we see today," they wrote.

Yet the U.S. mainstream media did not give it the same attention,  
even though it was, in many ways, a direct response to O'Hanlon and  
Pollack's assertions. In an Aug. 21 analysis piece published by the  
Associated Press, Charles Babington wrote that Democrats were  
"wearily anticipating" the upcoming mid-September report, "realising  
that opponents will use any upbeat assessment to portray them as  
defeatists just as glimmers of hope appear."

Those glimmers of hope have been provided by O'Hanlon and Pollack,  
but the words of the seven U.S. servicemen appear to have gone under  
the radar. They were nowhere to be found in Babington's report.