O'Hanlon and Pollack

I'm almost tired of talking about O'Hanlon and Pollack, but it's telling as to the biases of the media and the political system that two Brookings hawks can get this much notoriety and press for detecting a glimmer of hope in Iraq, while the hundreds and hundreds of experts who have turned against this way -- including O'Hanlon's frequent co-author James Steinberg -- garner absolutely no press.

A thought experiment: If Michael O'Hanlon had written an op-ed on the same day, in the same paper, at the same length, saying that the surge was certain to fail, what would the reaction have been? Would he be all over the Sunday shows? Would he be constantly referenced in Congress? Would the political system be deeply concerned, or attentive, to his criticisms? And if not, why not?

And remember: This isn't merely an instance of the media valuing counter-intuitivism. O'Hanlon and Pollack aren't getting this much press because they bravely said X (surge is working) when everyone else was saying Y (it isn't). The run-up to the war gave exactly this type of press to people like Ken Pollack who supported the war. Then, as now, the media was interested in promoting pro-war justifications, not anti-war views. And so pundits and politicians can still do much more to raise their profile by speaking in favor of the war in Iraq, rather than against it.