After all the gabble today over the Times’ OpEd piece about “winning” in Iraq, it turns out to be a misunderstanding--or more accurately, a mis-titling.
This evening, co-author Kenneth Pollack told Wolf Blitzer on CNN: “Mike and I did not choose the title. We had nothing to do with it...we came back optimistic--but very guardedly optimistic...
”It's not necessarily the title Mike and I would have chosen for it. But when you write for the Times, the Times gets to choose the title...
”As we say in the piece, I don't know what victory really means. You know, if victory means that we're going to create a country like Switzerland, you know, Iraq is at least 50 or 60 years away from that.”
So a more accurate title, if the writers of the piece were to choose it, would have been “A War We Might Just Win in 50 Years.”
Oops.
Great reporter that he is, Wolf failed to ask Pollack what the original title was. It would have been nice to know.
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