beat the devil

Reyes comes to his important post with an open mind, meaning an
  empty one. He knows nothing of the region. This became clear in his
  brief parley with a reporter from /Congressional Quarterly/ who had
  the impudence to ply him with questions at the end of a tiring day,
  when men of mature judgment head for the bar. /CQ/'s man asked Reyes
  if Al Qaeda was Sunni or Shiite. Reyes tossed a mental coin.
  "Predominantly--probably Shiite." Wrong, of course, since Al Qaeda
  is Sunni, of a notoriously intolerant strain. It's as if Reyes had
  called the Pope a Presbyterian.

  Then the pesky newshound probed him on the matter of Hezbollah.
  "Hezbollah. Uh, Hezbollah..." Reyes answered irritably. "Why do you
  ask me these questions at 5 o'clock?" Back in 2002 Reyes, a Vietnam
  vet, was opposed to the war. Give him clout as Intelligence
  Committee chair and he starts citing John McCain approvingly, even
  upping the mad Arizonan's troop-boost call by 10,000.

  At least Gordon Smith can publicly concede that as things stand, the
  Iraq mission is a disaster, and quitting time is here. No prominent
  Democrats in Congress besides Jack Murtha can bring themselves to do
  that. (I include here Senator Slither, otherwise known as Barack
  Obama, who trims to every shift in the wind.) The language is always
  of pleasing schedules, in which a (fictional) entity called the
  Iraqi Army, at the disposition of an (imaginary) power called the
  Iraqi government, can be welded into an (entirely fantastical)
  nonsectarian force by (as yet unavailable and putatively suicidal)
  US military trainers.

  Suicidal? A poll cited by the Iraq Study Group found that 61 percent
  of Iraqis believe that it is appropriate where possible to attack
  the US occupying troops. Since the poll included Kurds, who are less
  hostile to the US presence, we can assume that the percentage of
  Sunnis and Shiites who think it a patriotic act to shoot or blow up
  a US soldier is well above 61 percent. Now imagine yourself as a US
  trainer embedded in an Iraqi unit, the vast majority of whose
  members believe it right and proper to kill you. "Suicidal" seems to
  be the correct term. These calls for a bigger US training force are
  complete hokum.

  You would have thought that Democrats would rush to hang their hats
  on the bipartisan ISG report, calling for cut and walk. But the
  long-awaited report is dead shortly after arrival. There aren't more
  than a handful or so of Democrats who are going to be caught in the
  same room as a report that calls for the return of the Golan Heights
  to Syria and dares to raise the issue of the right of return of
  Palestinians to their homeland. In America these days persons in
  political life can describe reality only if they are self-employed,
  with a guaranteed independent income and above 75 years of age.
  Jimmy Carter and James Baker are two prime examples of this truth.
  Otherwise fantasy rules in Congress and the press, which has
  consistently misrepresented the extent of the disaster in Iraq,
  preferring to promote fatal illusions about a viable central
  government and fantasies of the United States being able to shape a
  new model army of Iraqis.

  No reporter has played a more assiduous role in fostering these
  delusions than Michael Gordon of the /New York Times/. Gordon
  somehow skipped free of the misreporting charges that finally caught
  up with his former colleague Judith Miller, even though he shared a
  byline with Miller in the very worst report, the claim that aluminum
  tubes were hard evidence of Saddam's WMD program. In the past
  months, in the /Times/ and on CNN Gordon has been laying down a
  propaganda barrage against speedy withdrawal and for a hike in US
  troop numbers in Iraq.

  At the /Washington Post/ David Ignatius has similarly been fostering
  the impression of feasible options in Iraq. "With enough troops and
  aggressive tactics," Ignatius wrote this year, "American forces can
  bring order to even the meanest streets." In March Ignatius, in
  Iraq, detected "unmistakable signs here this week that Iraq's
  political leaders are taking the first tentative steps towards
  forming a broad government of national unity that could reverse the
  country's downward slide." His keen eye detected a "new spirit of
  accord."

  So here we have the /Times/'s and /Post/'s lead
  reporter/commentators on the war diligently promulgating the core
  fantasy: that the United States has options beyond accepting defeat.
  The vast majority of Iraqis want US forces out. Militarily the
  United States has been defeated. Diplomatically it is isolated.
  Politically it is immobilized. From the Republican defeats at the
  polls through to the publication of the Iraq Study Group report,
  there was a window for Washington to commence diplomatic operations
  to get out with all speed. That opportunity has almost gone. The
  House Democrats rejected Murtha. In the Senate they gave swift and
  unanimous approval to Robert Gates, a career intelligence faker with
  a shameful recent record at Texas A&M of opposing affirmative
  action. Let's see how many Democrats will oppose their leadership's
  recommendation that they vote to approve the supplemental budget
  appropriation early next year--probably $160 billion--which will
  give Bush enough money to keep the war going till he leaves town.
  Let's see if the antiwar movement can organize sit-ins in the
  offices of Democratic Reps preparing to vote those funds.