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Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of Brookings write an op-ed in the NYT:

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration's critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily "victory" but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

Pollack is a serious thinker and author of both The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq and The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America (highly recommended). He was a heavily equivocating supporter of initial invasion and an early critic of the post-war planning and execution. To various individuals it's relevant that he's a former CIA analyst and a Clinton-era NSC staffer. Having read the two aforementioned, exhaustively detailed books, I have a lot of respect for his opinion.

(Via Hot Air)

UPDATE: Dean Barnett (among others, no doubt) characterizes Brookings as a "hard left" institution, which would add Nixon-to-China credibility to the op-ed. I often like Barnett's writing, but he's enthusiastically off in that description. It's fair to say that Brookings falls left of center, but labeling it (and by extension, the authors) "hard left" is inaccurate and diminishes both analysis of the op-ed and the definition of "hard left" itself.

That said, it's still notable that such serious, high-profile critics of the war's execution see progress now.

UPDATE: And to err on the side of caution, Joe Klein brings up a good point:

I agree with many, but not all, of the conclusions Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon reach in this NY Times column, but you really can't write a piece about the wae in Iraq and devote only two sentences to the political situation, which is disastrous and, as Petraeus has said, will determine the success or failure of the overall effort.

Tabling Klein's decision to use the word "disastrous," any military gains are indeed just buying time and space for political progress. My guess is that O'Hanlon and Pollack assumed the reader might know that.

UPDATE: And we must note the inevitable and predictable Glenn Greenwald pushback on the op-ed, where he seeks to undermine the credibility of the authors by painting them as "yes-men." He starts with quotations of an interview done with O'Hanlon in 2003, where the analyst asserts that the counterinsurgency is going "fairly well" and minimizes the violence. Problematically for Greenwald, at various times the Iraq war has gone better than others - the bombing of the Al-Askari Mosque in 2006 being the real turning point for the road to hell-in-a-handbasket - and this Greenwaldian ignorance of context (sometimes willfull, sometimes not) sets one's teeth grinding. The descent of the policy was not irrevocably obvious in the first year of the occupation, except to those who had predetermined Iraq's fate as a hellish one spurred by US intervention.

And Pollack (one half of what Greenwald refers to as the "war cheerleading pair,' despite the Salon post's focus on O'Hanlon) did levy criticisms in 2004:

Mourning After: How They Screwed It Up

The primary cause of our current problems in Iraq is the reckless, and often foolish, manner in which this administration has waged the war and the reconstruction. For that reason, when I think back to the prewar debate, the thought that nags at me most is that I, too, should have foreseen what Bill Galston did—that the Bush administration would not fight the war properly. It looms in my thinking as something that probably could have been known before the war and that, had I recognized it, might have led me down a different intellectual path.

Pollack also addressed the tendency of war critics to pre-emptively assume Iraq a failure in late 2006: **

It never had to be this bad. The reconstruction of Iraq was never going to be quick or easy, but it was not doomed to failure.[1] Its disastrous course to date has been almost entirely the result of a sequence of foolish and unnecessary mistakes on the part of the United States.

Perhaps at some point in the future, revisionist historians will try to claim that the effort was doomed from the start, that it never was possible to build a stable, let alone pluralistic, new Iraq in the rubble of Saddam Hussein's fall. However, that is decidedly not the view of the experts, the journalists covering the story, or the practitioners who went to Iraq to put the country back together after the 2003 invasion.

What follows is a scathing critique of the Administration's execution of the war. Other criticisms were levied in Slate's "Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War.' The fact that Pollack aggressively recognized and publiclized failures in Iraq lends at least some credibility to his caveated change of heart today. No matter what Greenwald's automated rebuttal template injects into the debate.

UPDATE: Dave Price:

Gleen's [Greenwald's] target audience has always been those easily fooled by weak arguments, or, dare I say, exercises in deceit. In 2003 and early 2004 most observers thought the effort was going well; we had, after all, just removed the regime in a three-week campaign. You can find approving noises from nearly everyone right of Cindy Sheeham in this time period; enthusiasm was so high Ted Kennedy accused Bush of "cooking up" the war "for political gain," which seems pretty laughable today. Approval for Bush's handling of Iraq was as high as 75% in 2003 and as high as 55% in early 2004, then trended downward as most observers, including the Brookings guys, took increasing violence as an indication the effort was not going very well; up until that point, what complaints there were generally centered around the lack of WMD and failure to capture Saddam. So it's hard to accuse Brookings of being overly sympathetic to the war effort on that basis.

** Note: I don't necessarily agree with Pollack's assessment that the war's "disastrous course to date has been almost entirely the result of a sequence of foolish and unnecessary mistakes on the part of the United States." The decrepit state of Iraq's civic institutions and spirit were more of a factor, though I agree that the post-war plan seriously screwed up the attempt at pacification and reconstruction. The point of the link - that Pollack has criticized the conduct of the war - remains, however.

Posted by Bill at July 30, 2007 10:38 AM | TrackBack (0)