don’t forgive and forget

One of Kevin Drum’s e-mailers writes in to ask whether it isn’t time to rehabilitate Pollack and O’Hanlon:

A member in (extremely good) standing of the VSP community emails to suggest a delicate topic for the liberal blogosphere to take a second look at:

One thing you might write about — if only because nobody else has, I think — is how that whole dust-up over the O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed looks in retrospect. I mean, clearly they were on to something — the relative quieting down of stuff that has taken place in Iraq over the last several months, etc. Completely debatable whether that was due to the surge, or is sustainable, or is deeply significant, etc. etc., but it’s not like the caricature of them put forth in the blogosphere at the time — as paid lobbyists for the Bushies, reporting back what they were told to after checking out a Potemkin village — holds up, does it?

Hmmm. Yes. Seems like I was pretty skeptical of the O’Hanlon/Pollack report myself.

Let’s just take a walk down memory lane and see what the self-assured whippershapper Matthew Yglesias had to say at the time the op-ed was published:

I think the evidence that O’Hanlon and Pollack are wrong here is fairly overwhelming. Statistics don’t really corroborate what O’Hanlon and Pollack say, there’s no particular reason to privilege “on the ground” knowledge if it was just fed to them by official sources (which appears to be the case), and, most of all, the point of the surge was to change the political situation in Iraq, and they concede it hasn’t done that.

Now, in response, Yglesias concedes nothing except that perhaps he should have been more optimistic that things could get better in Iraq. As for Pollack and O’Hanlon, he suggests they were lying at the time and totally in the tank for Bush:

It remains unclear whether or not they actually visited any portion of Iraq that wasn’t a “Potemkin village” of sorts. For some reason or other, for example, they seem to have not noticed that Baghdad had become a network of walled-off ethnically cleansed cantons.

Clearly, though, the summertime decline in violence has proven more sustainable than I thought it would at the time. Equally clearly, Pollack and O’Hanlon have a good relationship with General Petraeus and came back from Iraq speaking from a set of misleading talking points designed to advance the political sustainability of the Bush administration’s policies.

Only a twentysomething think-tank wonk wannabe would use Middle East-themed buzzwords like “ethnically cleansed” and “cantons” and believe that he was fooling people into thinking that he was making a serious argument.

Drum’s commenters, on the other hand, offer the full spectrum of views on the left—from continued assertions that Pollack and O’Hanlon were tools to more forgiving ones.

The most incisive and intellectually honest assessment is this one:

It was the timimg of the op-ed, coming just a little over two weeks before Petraeus’ report, that helped enable the spin doctors to establish the meme “The surge is working.”

O’Hanlan and Pollack were more cautious in their actual assessment than the ensuing spin, but the combination of suggesting some “success” and being presented as “two prior critics of the war” gave the opening.

Now we’re stuck with military success being the metric for “The surge is working.”

All of this is true. Pollack and O’Hanlon, well-known for their knowledge about Iraq, took a trip to there, met with Petraeus (whom O’Hanlon knew from graduate school), and wrote an op-ed that said, essentially: Things might just work out in Iraq after all.

They didn’t make the most convincing case of it, but they did lay the groundwork for a more hopeful view of the eventual outcome—something that Americans wanted then and still want now, so that our sacrifices will not have been in vain.

At the end of July 2007, the leftosphere was unprepared to hear any Democrat offer even such a weak ray of hope and attacked the messengers, especially their fellows on the left (a favorite pastime ever since there has been a left). Some parts of the leftosphere are still in an unforgiving mood.

I don’t know the ways of Washington in particular, but I like to think that I know a thing or two about the ways of the world. Election 2008 is (incredibly) still a year away. The future is unpredictable. It’s not a good ideas to make enemies for life when you’re in your twenties.

And, electorally speaking, I will repeat what I said during the General Betray-us scandal: If the hard left—accompanied by the bleeding-heart left, whose HQ is in Hollywood—thinks it can win electoral victories by offering a narrative about bad Americans (and an evil American hegemon) not worthy of redemption, it will encounter rough seas ahead.