Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Some commentators on the right, among them detested neo-cons , are referring to Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy posture – only a president actually makes foreign policy – as “reality based.” This is bad news for the bad news bears at DailyKos and other outposts of progressive aversion. Hillary Clinton has brought into her campaign Michael O'Hanlon , the co-author of “A War We Just Might Win,” the New York Times piece that changed opinion on the war within the reality based community. O’Hanlon pointed out in his piece that the surge in Iraq was having some positive effects. The surge, the ham-fisted and counterproductive methods of jihadists in places they formerly occupied and perhaps a weariness among Americans with the “can’t do” attitude of the war resistors all have played a role in the reduction of violence in Iraq in September. Hillary Clinton , when pressed, put it this way when she spoke in mid-September at the Veterans of Foreign Wars 108th annual convention in Kansas Cit...

Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, both senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, considered by many a liberal think tank, published on July 30 a column in the New York Times that immediately caused ripples in the leftist anti-war community. The lede was startlingly blunt: “Viewed from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.” And the second paragraph, written by two thoughtful consistent critics of President Bush’s prosecution of the war, was a stunner: “Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we ...