The Sounds of Silence — How Sweet It Would Be

Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon, two top Democratic party foreign policy mavens, were instrumental in bringing around the Democrats in the run-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Now they’re back, with more advice: we’re winning and the “surge” needs to go on until at least 2008. And we should listen to them … exactly why? Their predictions weren’t all that great last time around. Here’s Pollack on the eve of the invasion:

“I believe that we are going to have to go war with Iraq sooner rather than later. The reason that it has to be sooner rather than later is because of Iraq’s development of nuclear weapons. …  the problem is that containment was a good policy when it was put in place, but by 1996, ’98, we realized that it really was failing. The inspectors weren’t finding anything. The Iraqis had gotten so good at hiding their weapons of mass destruction that the inspectors just couldn’t find anything.”

The reason they weren’t finding anything is because nothing was there. But that wasn’t an option for Senor Pollack. After all, he had an agenda …

O’Hanlon had — has? — an identical agenda, and was similarly completely, utterly, and totally wrong about Iraq’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction”:

“What we know for a fact from a number of defectors who’ve come out of Iraq over the years is that Saddam Hussein is absolutely determined to acquire nuclear weapons and is building them as fast as he can.”

And this nonsense, uttered in the winter of 2003: 

“Democrats implicitly assume that Iraq will still be as big a national problem come election time next fall. That assumption is probably wrong. For one thing, a number of trends in Iraq today—in the education and health sectors, in electricity levels, in availability of fuels for cooking and heating, and in market activity—are more positive than commonly appreciated.

“Perhaps most crucially, U.S. troops in Iraq will almost surely be fewer in number—and less exposed to attack—come next fall.” 

Tell me this: why in the name of all that’s holy should anybody listen to these guys — about anything? What this warmongering duo needs to do is take a vow of silence for the next decade or so.