Ilan Goldenberg, who was hating on Michael E. O’Hanlon before it was fashionable, brings a different perspective to the Brookings Benchmarks debate. O’Hanlon may not be very good at policy analysis, but he’s the Kevin Garnett of getting his pieces in op-ed pages:

Major op-ed pages such as the NY Times, Washington Post, USA Today and Wall Street Journal seem to have informal policies regarding how often one person should be represented in an op-ed page.  That’s because these pieces of journalistic real estate are very valuable and they don’t want to over-represent any one individual.  Yet these rules apparently don’t apply to Mike O’Hanlon. …

Unless you are a cabinet level position or higher, nobody deserves this type of representation.  There is nothing special about Michael O’Hanlon.  He has no unique expertise on this issue.  There is no shortage of fantastic Iraq experts, who quite frankly are much more qualified and expert on Iraq, and have a variety of views on the issue (And this applies to both conservatives and progressives).  It’s time for these op-ed page editors to exercise some editorial responsibility and stop over-representing O’Hanlon.