Flynt Leverett Calls Ken Pollack 'Flat-Out Wrong'

A few minutes ago in a speech before the New America Foundation, Flynt Leverett, a former CIA and NSC official, attacked Kenneth Pollack, the "thinker" at Saban/Brookings who served up the Iraq war on a silver platter for liberals. Leverett said Pollack had made a "deeply-flawed and flat-out wrong case regarding WMD," which led him to assert in his book The Threatening Storm that invading Iraq was "the conservative option."

The speech was remarkable because Leverett once worked alongside Pollack at Brookings. Sort of like Anatol Lieven, who had to parachute out of Carnegie when they didn't want to hear what he had to say about Israel. "People at the thinktanks have courage somewhere between a seaslug and sheep-guts," Lieven told me earlier this year. What a pleasure to watch the war-party delaminate.

But how amazing is it that Pollack maintains credibility? "Now he's doing it on Iran," Leverett notes, pointing to a Dec. 8 Op-Ed in the Times. And at a CFR event not long ago, Pollack was all-but-praising neocon Reuel Marc Gerecht's burn-down-the-house option for Iran.