- Michael O'Hanlon
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Michael Edward O'Hanlon (born 1961) is a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, specializing in defense and foreign policy issues. He began his career as a budget analyst in the defense field.[1]
Contents
Biography
Education and early career
O'Hanlon earned an A.B. in 1982, M.S.E. in 1987, M.A. in 1988, and a Ph.D in 1991 all from Princeton University, and is now a visiting lecturer there. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kinshasa, Congo in the 1980s.
Personal life
O'Hanlon married Cathryn Ann Garland in 1994.[2] They have two daughters, one of whom is on the autism spectrum.[3] In addition to his work in the U.S. foreign policy field, O'Hanlon is an activist for people with special needs.
The Iraq War
Support and Caution
Along with Brookings scholar Philip Gordon, O'Hanlon wrote in the Washington Post in late 2001 that any invasion of Iraq would be difficult and demanding and require large numbers of troops.[4] This article led to Kenneth Adelman's famous prediction of a 'cakewalk' in a subsequent rebuttal in that same newspaper, but Gordon and O'Hanlon's argument was validated by subsequent events on the ground. O'Hanlon argued at a major forum on Iraq at the American Enterprise Institute in the fall of 2002 that an invasion of Iraq could lead to 150,000 U.S. troops remaining in that country for 5 years, while expressing his view that a war should occur only if inspections failed to fully confirm the disarmament of Saddam's stocks of weapons of mass destruction.[5]
By late 2002 and early 2003, O’Hanlon appeared in the American media as a public proponent of the Iraq War. Interviewed by Bill O’Reilly in February 2003, he was asked “Any doubt about going to war with Saddam?” To which he replied “Not much doubt.”[6]
O'Hanlon also predicted in early 2003 in an article in the journal Orbis that an invasion of Iraq could lead to as many as several thousand American fatalities,[7] a prediction also unfortunately confirmed by later developments. He decided in 2003 to create Brookings' Iraq Index,[8] a web-based resource tracking trends in the country that has been perhaps Brookings most widely viewed site this decade, and which led to later decisions to create Afghanistan[9] and Pakistan[10] indices at Brookings as well. Excerpts of these indices have run on a quarterly basis in the New York Times since 2004.[11]
On July 9, 2007, O'Hanlon said during a panel discussion in Washington, D.C. that a "soft partition" of Iraq is already occurring that might break the country up into three autonomous regions - Kurdistan, "Shi'astan" and "Sunnistan".
- Iraq is being ethnically segregated. Ethnic cleansing is on its way, it's happening, and at least a couple million people have been displaced. It's becoming Bosnia in some ways, he added.[12]
In a July 30, 2007 op-ed piece in the New York Times O'Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack, just back from an 8-day DOD-scheduled itinerary in Iraq reported that:
- [A]s 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.[13]
Controversy
Critics however, have called into question the veracity of O'Hanlon's claim to have been a harsh critic of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq, arguing that it was a deceitful assertion intended to lend the article increased credibility.[14] According to attorney and columnist Glenn Greenwald, O'Hanlon and Pollack "were not only among the biggest cheerleaders for the war, but repeatedly praised the Pentagon's strategy in Iraq and continuously assured Americans things were going well".[15]
On August 25, 2007, he made an attempt to answer his critics in an Op-ed in Washington Post.[16] In response to the charge that he based his judgment on "dog-and-pony shows" in Baghdad, he claimed that his assessment was also informed by years of study of the situation through a large number of knowledgeable sources, including many that were reflected in the Iraq Index (and contributed to its sober message for much of the war).
Writing in the National Interest in May 2008, O’Hanlon gave himself 7 marks out of 10 for his predictions about Iraq, although he acknowledged that among his incorrect positions was his initial support for the war - given the Bush administration’s poor preparations for the post-Saddam period.[17]
Letter by Project for the New American Century
O'Hanlon signed a letter and a statement on postwar Iraq published by the Project for the New American Century.[18][19]
Other Major Areas of Research
Afghanistan
O'Hanlon's 2010 book with Hassina Sherjan, an Afghan-American woman living in Kabul, is called Toughing It Out in Afghanistan. It largely explains and supports the Obama administration's decisions to focus on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan while greatly expanding the size of the US military presence there.
Defense Analysis
O'Hanlon's other main areas of work over the years include studies on defense technology issues, such as missile defense and space weaponry and the future of nuclear weapons policy, on Northeast Asian security coauthored with experts such as Mike Mochizuki and Richard Bush, and on defense strategy and budget issues that follow a long Brookings tradition on the subject pioneered by scholars such as William Kaufmann, Barry Blechman, and Joshua Epstein.
Many of the analytical approaches that O'Hanlon employs in these various efforts were explained in his 2009 Princeton University Press book, The Science of War, which discusses methods of defense analysis - a subject that O'Hanlon currently teaches at Princeton and Johns Hopkins, while also directing research in the foreign policy program at Brookings since 2009.
Stance on Wikileaks
Discussing the controversy around Julian Assange's Wikileaks project with a journalist, when asked what he would do if he was seated across the table from Assange, O'Hanlon asked whether he'd be armed or unarmed in this situation, further responding with "BLAM!" - implying that he would [like to] kill Assange. He later specified that he “would like to see Assange behind bars, which is where he belongs.”[20]
Partial bibliography
All books published by Brookings Institution Press
- Crisis on the Korean Peninsula: How to Deal with a Nuclear North Korea (with Mike Mochizuki; 2003)
- Neither Star Wars nor Sanctuary: Constraining the Military Uses of Space (2004)
- Defense Strategy for the Post-Saddam Era (2005)
- The Future of Arms Control (with Michael A. Levi; 2005)
- Protecting the Homeland 2006/2007 (with Michael d'Arcy, Peter Orszag, Jeremy Shapiro, and James Steinberg; 2006)
- Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security (with Kurt Campbell; 2006)
- Toughing It Out in Afghanistan (with Hassina Sherjan; 2010)
References
- ^ Brookings Institution website
- ^ New York Times
- ^ Kids with autism deserve better
- ^ Washington Post
- ^ AEI - The Day After: Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq
- ^ The O’Reilly Factor, Fox News, 28 February 2003
- ^ Estimating Casualties in a War to Overthrow Saddam
- ^ Iraq Index - The Brookings Institution
- ^ Afghanistan Index - The Brookings Institution
- ^ Pakistan Index - The Brookings Institution
- ^ States of Conflict: An Update
- ^ UPI.com
- ^ New York Times opinion piece dated 30 July 2007
- ^ Tucker attacks ‘hysterical’ bloggers
- ^ Salon.com
- ^ O'Hanlon, Michael (25 August 2007). "The Work Behind Our Iraq Views". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/24/AR2007082401645.html?hpid=opinionsbox1.
- ^ O’Hanlon strikes back, Michael O’Hanlon, The National Interest, 20 May 2008
- ^ Letter to Congress on Increasing U.S. Ground Forces January 28, 2005, accessed 2 August 2007.
- ^ Second Statement on Postwar Iraq, March 28, 2003, accessed 2 August 2007.
- ^ Ross, Oakland (6 December 2010). "Guiding light or evil genius, WikiLeaks founder sparks fierce emotions". The Star (Toronto). http://www.thestar.com/article/901554. Retrieved 8 December 2010.
External links
Categories:- American political writers
- American non-fiction writers
- Princeton University alumni
- American people of Irish descent
- Living people
- 1961 births
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