On July 30, as the debate over the Bush administration’s “surge” in Iraq was heating up, The New York Times ran an op-ed article that enthusiastically endorsed it. Titled A WAR WE MIGHT JUST WIN, it was written by Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, both of the Brookings Institution, and, reading through it, I grew increasingly irritated. Part of the problem was the piece’s gushing tone. “After the furnace-like heat,” they wrote, “the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops.” Soldiers and marines “told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.”

From Ramadi, where they talked with a Marine captain whose company “was living in harmony” with Iraqi security forces; to Baghdad’s Ghazaliya neighborhood, which was “slowly coming back to life with stores and shoppers”; to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul, where Iraqi security forces had “stepped up to the plate,” the surge was helping produce a “new Iraq,” O’Hanlon and Pollack argued, and as a result, “Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.”

From reading their report, it was impossible to tell that U.S. soldiers were still being blown up by IEDs and that mangled corpses continued to appear on Baghdad’s streets. O’Hanlon and Pollack noted that they had spent eight days in Iraq, and I wondered how freely they had been able to move about. An answer was provided two weeks later by Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, who wrote that O’Hanlon told him in an interview that the two had largely followed an itinerary developed by the Defense Department. No mention...

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