“Men who wear red shirts are crazy and dangerous,” said the man in the red shirt

Kenneth Pollack, writing an op-ed for the New York Times with Michael O’Hanlon today:

A War We Might Just Win

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 were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with…

[T]here is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

Kenneth Pollack, writing in The Threatening Storm in 2002:

Saddam has a twenty-eight year pattern of aggression, violence, miscalculation, and purposeful underestimation of the consequences of his actions that should give real pause to anyone…

Even when Saddam does consider a problem at length…his own determination to interpret geopolitical calculations to suit what he wants to believe anyway lead him to construct bizarre scenarios that he convinces himself are highly likely.