O’Hanlon of Brookings Sorts Out the Wrong Neocons From the Right Ones

Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution was a big promoter of the Iraq War (Glenn Greenwald has machicolated him definitively). And today he was on NPR talking about ideology. Reporter Scott Horsley, noting that McCain calls himself an idealist realist, had said that the word neocon has become “radioactive” in Washington. But O’Hanlon explained that there were wrong neocons and right neocons. The bad ones were the ones at the Pentagon who chose to do the war on the cheap, without enough forces etc. I guess he meant Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Shulsky et al. (God I love repeating those names!). The good ones, O’Hanlon was saying by implication, were the neocons who dreamed up the idea of going into Iraq in the first place. A great idea, badly executed. When is the media going to stop giving cover to the authors of this disaster? The next time someone says, There should have been more troops, ask them why they didn’t go in?