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Everybody has already taken their whacks at today’s Times Op ed by Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, which argued that we “just might win” the war and that the political debate in Washington is “surreal” and out of touch with the progress being made there.

But here’s an amusing postscript to this whole saga. It turns out that this assessment by O’Hanlon today is in some key ways strikingly at odds with…

…the Brookings Institution’s own Iraq Index, a meticulous and regularly updated compilation of stats designed to paint as realistic a portrait as possible of the situation on the ground.

And guess who oversees the Brookings Iraq Index?

Yup — it’s overseen by Michael O’Hanlon.