Michael Edward O'Hanlon (born May 16, 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]
Michael Edward O'Hanlon (born May 16, 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]
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O'Hanlon earned an A.B. in 1982 (in Physics), 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. O'Hanlon is reasonably fluent in French, having taught physics in French in the Peace Corps for two years in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1980s.
O'Hanlon married Cathryn Ann Garland in 1994. [2] They have two daughters. In addition to his work in the U.S. foreign policy field, he is an activist for people with special needs.[ citation needed ]
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. [3] 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. He argued at a major forum on Iraq at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) 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. [4]
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 Fox News in February 2003, he was asked "Any doubt about going to war with Saddam?" O'Hanlon replied "Not much doubt." [5]
O'Hanlon predicted in early 2003 in the journal Orbis that an invasion of Iraq could lead to as many as several thousand American fatalities, [6] a prediction also confirmed by later developments. He decided in 2003 to create Brookings' Iraq Index, [7] 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 [8] and Pakistan [9] indices at Brookings as well. Excerpts of these indices ran on a quarterly basis in the New York Times from 2004 through 2012. [10]
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".[ citation needed ]
Months after the Surge which increased American troop levels and overhauled the war's strategy, 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. [12]
Critics 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. [13] 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". [14]
On August 25, 2007, he made an attempt to answer his critics in an Op-ed in Washington Post. [15] 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).[ citation needed ]
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. [16]
O'Hanlon signed a letter and a statement on postwar Iraq published by the Project for the New American Century. [17] [18]
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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.
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 Barry Blechman, William Kaufmann, 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 Columbia, Princeton and Johns Hopkins, while also directing research in the foreign policy program at Brookings since 2009.
The Bush Doctrine refers to multiple interrelated foreign policy principles of the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush. These principles include unilateralism, preemptive war, and regime change.
Opposition to the Iraq War significantly occurred worldwide, both before and during the initial 2003 invasion of Iraq by a United States–led coalition, and throughout the subsequent occupation. Individuals and groups opposing the war include the governments of many nations which did not take part in the invasion, including both its land neighbors Canada and Mexico, its NATO allies in Europe such as France and Germany, as well as China and Indonesia in Asia, and significant sections of the populace in those that took part in the invasion. Opposition to the war was also widespread domestically.
Paul Dundes Wolfowitz is an American political scientist and diplomat who served as the 10th President of the World Bank, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, and dean of Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., that focused on United States foreign policy. It was established as a non-profit educational organization in 1997, and founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. PNAC's stated goal was "to promote American global leadership." The organization stated that "American leadership is good both for America and for the world," and sought to build support for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity."
William Kristol is an American neoconservative writer. A frequent commentator on several networks including CNN, he was the founder and editor-at-large of the political magazine The Weekly Standard. Kristol is now editor-at-large of the center-right publication The Bulwark.
Jay Montgomery Garner is a retired United States Army lieutenant general who in 2003 was appointed as Director of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, making him the immediate replacement of Saddam Hussein as the de facto head of state of Iraq. Garner was soon replaced by Ambassador Paul Bremer and the ambassador's successor organization to ORHA, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
Kenneth Michael Pollack is an American former CIA intelligence analyst and expert on Middle East politics and military affairs. He has served on the National Security Council staff and has written several articles and books on international relations. Currently, he is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, "where he works on Middle Eastern political-military affairs, focusing in particular on Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf countries. Before that he was Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Advisor at Albright Stonebridge Group, a global business strategy firm.
Eliot Asher Cohen is an American political scientist. He was a counselor in the United States Department of State under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009. In 2019, Cohen was named the 9th Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, succeeding the former dean, Vali Nasr. Before his time as dean, he directed the Strategic Studies Program at SAIS. Cohen "is one of the few teachers in the American academy to treat military history as a serious field", according to international law scholar Ruth Wedgwood. Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is also, with former U.S. diplomat Eric Edelman, the cohost of the Shield of the Republic podcast, published by The Bulwark.
Frederick W. Kagan is an American resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and a former professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
The main event by far shaping the foreign policy of the United States during the presidency of George W. Bush (2001–2009) was the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent war on terror. There was massive domestic and international support for destroying the attackers. With UN approval, US and NATO forces quickly invaded the attackers' base in Afghanistan and drove them out and the Taliban government that harbored them. It was the start of a 20-year quagmire that finally ended in failure with the withdrawal of United States troops from Afghanistan.
David Howell Petraeus is a retired United States Army general and public official. He served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from September 6, 2011, until his resignation on November 9, 2012. Prior to his assuming the directorship of the CIA, Petraeus served 37 years in the United States Army. His last assignments in the Army were as commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and commander, U.S. Forces – Afghanistan (USFOR-A) from July 4, 2010, to July 18, 2011. His other four-star assignments include serving as the 10th commander, U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) from October 13, 2008, to June 30, 2010, and as commanding general, Multi-National Force – Iraq (MNF-I) from February 10, 2007, to September 16, 2008. As commander of MNF-I, Petraeus oversaw all coalition forces in Iraq.
The term liberal hawk refers to a politically liberal person who supports a hawkish, interventionist foreign policy.
The rationale for the Iraq War, both the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent hostilities, was controversial. The George W. Bush administration began actively pressing for military intervention in Iraq in late 2001. The primary rationalization for the Iraq War was articulated by a joint resolution of the United States Congress known as the Iraq Resolution. The US claimed the intent was to "disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people".
The Iraq War was a protracted armed conflict in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 that began with the invasion of Iraq by the United States-led coalition that overthrew the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. The conflict continued for much of the next decade as an insurgency emerged to oppose the coalition forces and the post-invasion Iraqi government. US troops were officially withdrawn in 2011. The United States became re-involved in 2014 at the head of a new coalition, and the insurgency and many dimensions of the armed conflict are ongoing. The invasion occurred as part of the George W. Bush administration's war on terror following the September 11 attacks, despite no connection between Iraq and the attacks.
Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and is a national security analyst on a number of global conflicts.
Meghan L. O'Sullivan is a former deputy national security adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan. She is Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a board member of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Kennedy School. She is a member of the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Raytheon, and the North American chair of the Trilateral Commission.
The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward – A New Approach is the report of the Iraq Study Group, as mandated by the United States Congress. It is an assessment of the state of the war in Iraq as of December 6, 2006, when the ISG released the report to the public on the Internet and as a published book. The report was seen as crucial by Bush, who declared: "And truth of the matter is, a lot of reports in Washington are never read by anybody. To show you how important this one is, I read it, and [Tony Blair] read it."
The Iraq War troop surge of 2007, commonly known as the troop surge, or simply the surge, refers to the George W. Bush administration's 2007 increase in the number of U.S. military combat troops in Iraq in order to provide security to Baghdad and Al Anbar Governorate.
Ivo H. Daalder, is President of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and has served since July, 2013. He was the U.S. Permanent Representative on the Council of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from May 2009 to July 2013. He is a specialist in European security. He was a member of the staff of United States National Security Council (NSC) during the administration of President Bill Clinton, and was one of the foreign policy advisers to President Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign.
Bruce O. Riedel is an American expert on U.S. security, South Asia, and counter-terrorism. He is currently a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He also serves as a senior adviser at Albright Stonebridge Group.
