From an NPR Interview, September 28, 2003:

    LIANE HANSEN: Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution. He just returned from a Pentagon-sponsored visit to Iraq and he's in the studio. Welcome back, Michael. What's it like in Iraq?

    MICHAEL O'HANLON: Well, it's obviously tough. It's a little better, however, than I thought for a couple of reasons. One is I think the counterinsurgency effort is going fairly well. Now obviously, you mention the number of attacks per day that continue; it's a real concern. We're still losing troops. Everyone's aware of that. The truck bombings in August were tragic. The assassination of the Governing Council member was tragic, but overall, the counterinsurgency mission seems to be going well in that we are taking out a lot more people than we're losing and I believe we're using force fairly selectively and carefully on balance.

    There's some mistakes here and there. Also, security is pretty good in most of the country despite the fact that it's not good everywhere and that we certainly hear the reports of violence on a daily basis.

    HANSEN: You say it was better than you thought. What were the surprises? Were there any?

    O'HANLON: I would say that the main surprise for me was probably that one could travel around the country, even flying over contested areas, with relatively confident sense of security. There wasn't as much need to avoid certain areas as I might have expected.

    There is obviously violence. There was violence in some of the regions that we visited on the days we were there. But you're talking about specific, isolated acts just like you would get in an American city. I'm not trying to say that this is a country at peace, but overall, we really do run most of the country together with our Iraqi partners and the resistance forces are very small pockets who operate only at a given moment here or there. . . .

    HANSEN: The Defense Department this past week announced the mobilization of 10,000 soldiers from the Army National Guard. The Bush administration has been trying to get countriesâ€"actually, mainly trying to get countries to sign up for peacekeeping responsibilities. Is the contingent, do you think, of the 160,000 American and British troops in and around Iraq sufficient?

    O'HANLON: My impression is it's roughly sufficient. I would probably go a little higher. But the bigger problem is just sustaining that number is going to be very hard, and that's the reason we have to call up more National Guardsmen.

And, just incidentally, despite heralding his Recent Trip to Iraq, as though that demonstrates he really knows what is going on "on the ground," this is what it consists of:

    HANSEN: Final question. Your visit was sponsored by the Defense Department. Are you concerned that you perhaps were given a rather narrow view of the country by your hosts?

    O'HANLON: There's no doubt. But we only had a couple days there. We talked primarily to American officials. However, we could be quite prying and we could really push them. And I think overall, nonetheless, I was reassured. We didn't meet a lot of Iraqis who could tell us how things were going, but on balance, I think we had some access.

As Greenwald himself says:

they have these new things now called "computers" that record what people say and write and keep all of that stored. So if someone claims to be a "war critic" or "war opponent," you can actually look and find out whether that is true.

Link

As for the current situation in Iraq, Rosa Brooks covered it well in yesterdays' LAT:

Over the last year, sectarian cleansing has often occurred with reluctant American connivance. Our troops have watched helplessly as neighbors have driven out neighbors, and the walls that U.S. troops build help freeze the new sectarian boundaries in place. In Washington, the administration still speaks of a unified Iraqi central government and "national reconciliation," but in practice, we've gained a respite from violence in part because we've given up on reconciliation and accepted sectarian segregation as the new status quo.

In other words, for all the early rhetoric about benchmarks, "political progress" and reconciliation, the truth is that most Washington insiders accept that we're heading toward a different and much grimmer version of Iraq. As Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group comments: "Iraq is moving in the direction of a failed state, with competing centers of power run by warlords and militias. The central government has no political control whatsoever beyond Baghdad, maybe not even beyond the Green Zone."

We used to say we wanted freedom and democracy. But these days, we'll settle for more warlords, more segregation and fewer bodies.