Michael O'Hanlon
Senior Fellow
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
Dear Michael,
Despite your impressive 7 day junket to Iraq, you don‘t know one iota more about Iraq than I do. Not one tiny bit. In fact, with as little as I profess to know about Iraq and combat, my pronouncements and predictions about Iraq have been 100% more accurate than yours.
I can honestly say that if I had ridden around in a Pave Hawk with a flak vest and a helmet for a whole week, surrounded by armed mercenaries (who make ten times what a $19K a year Marine makes), and if I had sat next to Colonels and had I been given the carefully choreographed PR tour complete with demonstrations of firepower and wolfing down an MRE or two, and even if the Wall Street Journal had promised me a forum and pretended that I knew something about combat the way they pretended that you know something about combat- even if all that were happening, I still would not lie to the public about the enormously bloody and hopeless clusterfuck that we have turned Iraq into.
Frankly I believe that the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institute and the like are nothing but fraudulent quasi-collegiant fronts for extremist policies that have done more to hurt America than any honest mistake any leader or group ever made. And you and Mr. Pollack are fraudulent poseurs who time and again supported the war and the trumpeted the gains we’ve made and attacked and diminished critics, even when they happen to be decorated combat veterans. And while I’m in a mood to be brutally honest, you and Mr. Pollack represent the one breed I wish were head to extinction: the Chickenhawk. The roving gangs of conservative youth, like the Young Republicans, all of fighting age and with guts full of fire...but nary a one of them heads to the recruitment center and none of these war cheerleaders will swear out an oath to the flag and all of them have no stomach for actual war. No, why should you waste your time patrolling Baghdad when you can bravely face the growing bands of liberal bloggers who oppose Bush’s winning policies.
Yes, you drink fine wines and fly in first class and quote Pericles while a basically apolitical 19 year-old Marine pays the price for your effete ivory tower papers. The worst part is that no matter how many Iraqis we sending fleeing from their homes into tent cities, no matter how many thousands of people we detain and torture, no matter how much of Iraq’s posterity we bomb into powder, people like you will never have any price to pay. The worst that will happen to you is that you will have to go onto some pro-war cable talking head and try not to look like an exaggerating coward. You will never have your legs blown off. You will never see how two or three years away from your family strains it. You will never have to come back and live off of a working class soldier’s salary. Quite the opposite, the wronger you are and the more you rewrite your own positions, the more you will be rewarded by today’s brilliantly accurate and trustworthy mainstream media, and the more speakers circuit honorariums will come your way.
I had a friend who disappeared in Iraq in a hail of gunfire some years ago in an Iraqi town that we do not even control anymore. In fact what’s left of that town is controlled by bands of Shiite militia. Neither you, nor he, nor his widow or children could ever really give anyone a good answer why he died, or what his death accomplished. Because Mr. O Hanlon while you pat yourself on the back for all the heady Global War On Terrorism talk you spew, you do it in a media environment that favors your positions regardless the reality. You forget how Americans in general would feel if we were allowed to regularly view the caskets at Dover Air Force base...or if we were allowed to see the graphic blood and guts and tortured bodies that are a daily thing for Iraqis. We don’t travel with a middle class Iraqi family now living in a tent in Syria. And all your big words and perspicacity notwithstanding, going from 90 attacks a day on coalition troops to 75 attacks a day isn’t enough progress for most Americans who live out here in the part of America we call Outside The Beltway.
I grew up in a proud military family. I have been a vendor to the military. I have tons of military friends in the Marines, The Army, the Air Force, and ANG units across the nation. Dozens of them are in between rotations in and out of theatre. I know this: You do not speak for them. Not in any way shape or form do you speak for the young men and women who actually had the courage to put on a uniform and go in harm's way. The more pundits and "Fellows" like you speak, the worse it gets for them.
Finally, I predicted that Iraq would be a horrible mess and you thought it might work out. I predicted it would be bloody and the country would look like Humpty Dumpty and his eggs. While I predicted this, you said there would be a stable government. I predicted there would be no weapons of mass destruction, you were on the fence. That's me 3, you 0. Should I go on? What's the point? We already know that Iraq will never be fixed and at the end of the day anyone with Google will be able to cut what you predicted and paste it over what really is happening.
Anyway, I realize there is little chance you will ever read this. But let me part with this: I really wish that the stenographic media with all their rouge and lipstick and cameras that is so charmed by you and fooled by your scholarly comportment would give us less of you and more from the actual soldiers in the field that aren’t handpicked by paid Bush Propagandists. You and your ilk don’t care about the troops. You don’t even care about the truth. You’re in it just to be a part of a celebrated and feted pundit class. Speaking from the heart of America, I truly believe that I speak for millions of Americans who really wish people like you and Pollack and Jonah Goldberg would just shut the fuck up.
Judah Maccabee
Fellow Blogger
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