I wish I was surprised...

But it really is just a symbol for how fucked up our politics and media are. We're going to stay in "IRAQ 4-EVAH" because just enough of a dog & pony show will keep things going. Glenn Greenwald (who will not be allowed to interview Patreaus) interviews O'Hanlon and exposes just what a fraud their whole trip was...and O'Hanlon admits it. Including how the media spin about him was a complete and utter fraud and everybody, including the media elites, and O'Hanlon knew it and didn't say a fucking thing.

GG: Given that some of the claims in your Op-Ed are based upon your conversations with Iraqis, and that the Iraqis with whom you spoke were largely if not exclusively ones provided to you by the U.S. military, shouldn't that fact have been included in your Op-Ed?

MO: If the suggestion is that in a 1,400 word Op-Ed, we ought to have mentioned that, I can understand that criticism, and if we should have included that, I apologize for not having done so. But I want to stress that the focus here was on the perspective of the U.S. military, and I did a lot of probing of what I was told, and remain confident in the conclusions that we reached about the military successes which we highlighted. But if you're suggesting that some of our impressions might have been shaped by the military's selection of Iraqis, and that we might have disclosed that, that is, I think, fair enough.

Of course, Glenn Greenwald is never invited on any cable news show or pundit fest. Those invitations are exclusively for Kate O'Beirne, Byron York, and Rich Lowry. For that matter, Anthony Cordesman who went on the same trip as O'Hanlon and came down with decidedly different conclusions...has not been on a single Cable News Network about his findings. Nor has any network corrected the record on Pollack and O'Hanlon being war and surge supporters, not critics.