The Establishment Strikes Back…Weakly

Worse, Finer and critics such as Rep. Jack Murtha and Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald have suggested that our analyses are based on a few days of military “dog-and-pony shows.” ~Michael O’Hanlon

Actually, Sen. Jim Webb (at approximately 1:15) was the one to refer most prominently to seeing “the dog-and-pony show” when he was in the military (via ThinkProgress).  Presumably, Rep. Murtha saw the same show when he was in Vietnam, but he is not the one to have said that.  I suppose it’s a minor point, but when writing a rebuttal of critics who accuse your previous op-ed of errors it probably doesn’t help your case that you can’t even properly identify your most prominent critics. 

O’Hanlon’s description of the criticism itself is also inaccurate.  This particular argument against the O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed (one of many) was not that the analyses are based on the so-called “dog-and-pony show,” but that the evidence of improving conditions that they used to make their analyses was derived from the “dog-and-pony show” that may not have been all together representative of the conditions in the rest of the countryside.  The main problem with the op-ed was that it took a partial, brief, stage-managed visit to Iraq as the source for evidence of improving conditions, just as Finer claimed, and Finer was arguing that everyone, pro- and antiwar alike, should stop making these misleading claims based on such limited experiences.