So there I was, 4:30 am, sitting on the sofa with a 2-month old in my arms. She had woken up coughing because of a cold my other daughter had given her. (We try very hard to teach our children not to be selfish - woo-hoo! Parenting success!!). Around 5 am all the local stations switched over to their Traffic! News! Weather! early morning stations. (I'm a morning person, but how do you look so cheerful at frickin' 5 am?)
Anyway, one of the little news stories that caught my attention was the local tv station reporting on the NYT Op-Ed the other day by the Brookings Institution scholars O'Hanlon and Pollack arguing that the surge currently underway in Iraq could work and we ought not start hightailing it out of there. People will disagree, naturally, but tell me, when was the last time you heard on your local tv news a report on something written in an Op-Ed page? Pretty interesting, it seems to me.
2 comments:
Kenneth Pollock is the author of "The Threatening Storm," which in the run-up to Gulf War II made a powerful case for removing Saddam on WMD grounds, as well as for aiding and abetting Arab terrorists, e.g., Abu Nidal. (N.B., I use "Arab" rather than "Muslim" or "Islamic" because I don't understand Abu Nidal to have been fired by religious fanaticism, but rather by anti-Semitism and Palestinian hypernationalism.) After the war failed to uncover sufficient quantities of the predicted unconventional weaponry, Pollock published what I recollect as a rather anguished mea culpa, and promptly turned against the war. And now that progress in Iraq is clear and a modest victory is in sight, he's back on board.
I'm sure Mr. Pollock is a fine scholar and a dedicated public servant. But he's also a front-runner. Funny that he keeps getting credit for changing his mind.
I'm surprised by the attention it's gotten, too, Michael.
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