O’Hanlon’s Lament

by dday

Michael O’Hanlon is deeply upset that he’s not able to pontificate so much anymore on his brillliant concept to get American soldiers held hostage doing police work on the streets of Baghdad.

Five years later, the United States remains at war in Iraq, but there are days when it would be hard to tell from a quick look at television news, newspapers and the Internet […]

“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.”

What a sad life, ONLY getting called once a day to spout the same patently false blithering nonsense again. I mean how can he go on, right? He’s merely had 13 op-eds in major newspapers in the last seven months. You call that a life in the public spotlight?

Of course, his lack of visibility is all those treacherous Democrats’ fault, anyway:

He argued that Americans who support the war might not have wanted to follow the news when it was bad, and that Americans against the war are less interested now that the news is better. And the presidential candidates, he said, have shown “surprisingly little interest in discussing it in detail.”

Actually, many of us are well aware that the news is not better, that arming and funding both sides of a sectarian divide is bound to catch up with us in both the Sunni and Shiite communities, and the ones disinterested in discussing the war in detail are those fabulists telling us how the news is so much better, people like… Michael O’Hanlon:

In an event at the American Enterprise Institute today, Brookings analyst Michael O’Hanlon — sitting next to hawks Fred Kagan and Ken Pollack — praised the Iraq surge, saying the surge architects would make former Green Bay Packers head coach Vince Lombardi “proud”:

“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.”

Y’know Mikey, maybe if you didn’t spout such irresponsible and ignorant tripe like that, on the same day that we mark 4,000 dead American soldiers (which is actually a ridiculously low number that doesn’t take into account contractors, journalists, coalition forces, Iraqi security forces and civilians), you’d get something like two calls a day. And wouldn’t that just make life more worth living for you!

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