You Should Have Thought of That Before You Left Home, Ultimate Super Edition
Kenneth Fucking Pollack writes to tell us that civil war in Iraq is a very bad thing. Honest to god, this kind of thing is all the explanation this blog’s frequent resort to profanity requires. Ken baby, it’s your civil war as much as anyone’s. Pollack did more than anyone to encourage the famous “liberal hawks” to provide the bipartisan patina so useful in getting the Iraq invasion started. In the Army, someone would have long since left him alone in the study with a pistol and the discreet interval required to make the only appropriate gesture of regret, genuine atonement being impossible under the circumstances. In Japan he’d be a picture of the different ways light reflects off entrails and cutlery. In Washington, he gets to write new articles, as if he were an epidemiologist and not Typhoid Mary.
Comment by matthew hogan —
August 20, 2006 @ 11:06 pm
I thought I was alone reacting that way when I saw his name on the piece.
Comment by anodyne —
August 20, 2006 @ 11:12 pm
So reading Lott’s book before reengaging Pollack didn’t take the edge off? Some people don’t have the STFU gene, nevertheless they continue to thrive. Have you ever seriously contemplated why this is so often true?
Comment by Charles Dodgson —
August 20, 2006 @ 11:31 pm
See also the James Fallows cover piece in the September Atlantic. The cover says in big type, “We win.” It’s based on advice from area “experts”; it starts by saying that most of these folks advocated the Iraq invasion and have come to regret it. Clearly, then they are to be implicitly trusted in whatever advice they have to offer now.
Comment by belle waring —
August 21, 2006 @ 9:03 am
what a shameless ratfucking bastard that guy is. he ought to be run out of town on a rail. I believed that shit! I was one of those deluded left-hawky morons! that he has the sheer audacity to write a book about fucking Iran now is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
Comment by Nell —
August 21, 2006 @ 9:11 am
No, Matthew, you’re not alone.
Comment by norbizness —
August 21, 2006 @ 11:20 am
In every interview, he always falls back to the “if they had done it right…” like some sort of fucking tautology because listen to Pollack he’s fucking infallible like Bruce Campbell or something.
Comment by darrelplant —
August 21, 2006 @ 11:53 am
Well, I was just listening to the ostensibly liberal Air America and turned off Al Franken (again) because of his continual focus on “how we ought to have sent more troops in.” No, Al and Kevin, we ought not to have gone in in the first place because anyone with any common sense in the US — and most of the rest of the world — knew there was no imminent threat.
Comment by AZrider —
August 21, 2006 @ 11:53 am
Looks a little like the Texas two-step…
Comment by Joel —
August 21, 2006 @ 12:00 pm
It’s odd sort of expert on the Middle East who writes that the PLO and Hezbollah were both born of civil wars. He seems to have a shaky grasp on the basic history of the region.
Comment by Hesiod —
August 21, 2006 @ 12:05 pm
Pollack’s also a liar.
He use dto cite Hussein Kemal as a source for the claim that Saddam still had WMD programs. But the released UN debriefing papers showed exactly the opposite. Kemal claimed that saddam has dismantled his programs after the Gulf War.
So, either he told the UN one thing and the CIA another, or Kenneth Pollack, who should have known what Kemal told the UN and us, is a liar.
I e-mailed him this quetsion before the Iraq war started, and never heard back from him.
To my knowledge he has NEVER addressed this sever problem with his credibility.
Comment by Joe Buck —
August 21, 2006 @ 12:10 pm
The latest claim from the liberal hawks is that the Bush administration didn’t do it right, that Rumsfeld overrode his generals and didn’t send enough troops. However, Pollack himself write that 100,000 troops would do the job, so he has no such cover.
Comment by Moe Blues —
August 21, 2006 @ 12:10 pm
The foundation of incompetence is ignorance, and Pollack, like so many others, is aggressively ignorant.
Personally, I love the fobbing off of “How Iraq got to this point…” Just his way of saying, “Yes, I was sleeping in that bed. I was there all night. But how that big turd appeared is an issue for others to figure out.”
Comment by nitpicker —
August 21, 2006 @ 12:14 pm
Thank God for Hesiod! I always point out that the use of Hussein Kamal proves that Pollack, Bush and the rest of them lied to get us into this war, but ain’t no one picking it up.
Comment by Maximus —
August 21, 2006 @ 12:23 pm
Yes, Hussein Kamel is the ultimate proof that the war was based on lies. Of course no war supporters will respond to this. How could they?
Comment by liberal —
August 21, 2006 @ 12:31 pm
Joel wrote, It’s odd sort of expert on the Middle East who writes that the PLO and Hezbollah were both born of civil wars.
Yeah, I thought that a little odd, too.
Comment by Hesiod —
August 21, 2006 @ 1:08 pm
I wrote a detailed blog post about Hussein Kemal back when the UN debriefing papoers were publicly disclosed.
Jim actually commented on it as well.
Kenneth Pollack isn’t merely wrong. He’s a liar.
Comment by Joel —
August 21, 2006 @ 1:09 pm
Here’s a gem of a misleading Pollack pre-war statement on Iraq. He’s tut-tutted about how the administration led us to war on many occasions, thus giving himself the veneer of reasonableness, but in reality he was peddling the exact same propaganda they were:
Comment by r€nato —
August 21, 2006 @ 1:19 pm
The war in Iraq has proved to be a disaster for the struggle against Osama bin Laden.
oh heavens to betsy, if only someone had warned us back in 2003 that the Iraq war would be a distraction from taking down Osama what’s-his-name…
Comment by Tom —
August 21, 2006 @ 1:23 pm
Here’s my email to Ken “Please Don’t Take My Lunch Money Again!” Pollack:
—
Sir,
What next? Here’s my recommendation for you:
http://tinyurl.com/ofxqz
The above link reveals directions to what may be the nearest Army recruiting station to Brookings. Given the outcome of you and your fellow pundits earlier recommendations, your current rhetoric has a sickening pall of mewling obtuseness about it that would be pathetic if it didn’t carry the stain of thousands upon thousands of corpses that were alive the last time you needed to “get your war on” to prove what a DC contender you are.
Since your class of uber-sheltered weenies evidently won’t be happy until our Republic is the New Sparta, set a good example and take advantage of the link I sent you. The sooner you’re in Fallujah or Baghdad on point, the sooner your currently putrid inveighing about “our responsibilities in Iraq” will assume a proton’s worth of credibility.
—-
Admittedly short on insight and originality, or for that matter, reason. Yet why did it feel so good to write and send?
Comment by CMike —
August 21, 2006 @ 1:48 pm
Pollack assumed that Gulf War II would be the same glorious martial triumph that Gulf War I was. He thereby reasoned cheerleading for the pro-war vanguard was the sine non qua for establishing himself as a member in the budding new generation of “wise men.” Pollack’s position was dictated, not by geo-political analysis, but by his own careerism.
Comment by r€nato —
August 21, 2006 @ 2:10 pm
It would help you understand why hacks like Pollack continue to be listened to in DC if you realize that it’s not like a sports event where we keep count of who was right most; it’s more like a play. These are roles to be filled by actors. Pollack fills the role of the Left-Wing Hawk With Gravitas.
Just like Nick Cage doesn’t really have to know how to fight a fire in order to play a fireman, Pollack doesn’t actually have to know much about Iraq or even be right. He just has to sound like he knows what he’s talking about. You know, give a convincing performance.
And even though Howard Dean was right about Saddam’s capture and about the war long before everyone else discovered he was indeed right, Dean fills the role of the Unhinged Radical Liberal Democrat. Therefore he is not to be listened to (la la la la la! to quote Tom Tomorrow) while Pollack (serious thinker!) should be. Hell Dean isn’t really much of a liberal but who cares? Facts, shmacts. Who’s right and who’s wrong has little to do with it. It’s all in the performance baby.
Comment by jerry —
August 21, 2006 @ 2:45 pm
Pollack’s wiki bio doesn’t say when he was born, but notes his BA in 88. That makes him 39 +- 1, or well within the Army’s age requirements.
Colin Powell: “You break it, you bought it.”
Kevin Fucking Pollack, please write your next Op-Ed from Basic Training.
Comment by jerry —
August 21, 2006 @ 2:46 pm
That’s Kenneth F. Pollack of course….
Comment by Mona —
August 21, 2006 @ 3:13 pm
Kenneth Fucking Pollack
“Strong enough for men, but I like it too.”(In best Irish, milk-maid lilt.)
Comment by Mona —
August 21, 2006 @ 3:17 pm
Actually, my aging mind recalled poorly about Kenneth Fucking Pollack. I meant to say: Manly yes, but I like it too.
Comment by Mark1 —
August 21, 2006 @ 9:39 pm
So what do you expect. Bush says that it would be a disaster to leave Iraq right now. How’s That? It wasn’t too fucking long ago that AWOL boy was prancing around in his action figure get-up on the deck of an aircraft carrier under a sign that said “Mission Accomplished.” So what mission was accomplished? That Saddam was removed from power? Now he has said on TV that Iraq had nothing to do with 911. So why did we take Saddam out anyway. I don’t know who the bigger idiot is, him or the American people.
Comment by liberal hawk hacks everywhere —
August 22, 2006 @ 1:36 am
that guy is our hero.
Comment by moonbiter —
August 22, 2006 @ 5:57 am
Shorter Kenneth Pollack in his own defense: If we had carried out the war successfully in Iraq we would have been successful.
Comment by John Quiggin —
August 22, 2006 @ 7:41 am
Snap!
Comment by Scroop Moth —
August 22, 2006 @ 5:04 pm
Pollack has a more plausible, though perhaps less brilliant self-justification than that offered by the preternatural Norman Podhoretz, who says in the new Commentary that the terrible violence in Iraq is actually a sign of — hang on — the enjoyment of “previously unimaginable liberties” and “enormous strides” of democratization.
Speaking of Pollack and other dead enders, has Ralph Peters gone to ground?
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 22, 2006 @ 5:06 pm
There is no Ralph Peters. I drove all the way home last night – 20 miles – and I didn’t see one.