Train at the end of the tunnel.

Sid Blumenthal finds those who know, and are willing to say...

"Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost."

"Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."

****

"I've never seen it so bad between the office of the secretary of defence and the military. There's a significant majority believing this is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been the Iranians and al-Qaida. Bin Laden could argue with some cogency that our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic."

Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency

"The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."

Retired general Joseph Hoare, former Marine Corps commandant and head of US Central Command

"I see no ray of light on the horizon at all...

"I see no exit. We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamisation. The idea that we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination. They will be tainted by their very association with the foreign occupier. In fact, we had more time and money in state building in Vietnam than in Iraq."

Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College

"We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can self-regenerate. The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed. The political culture is more hostile to the US presence. The longer we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view."

W Andrew Terrill, the Army War College's top Iraq expert

Turns out Iraq isn't really like Vietnam at all. After all, whatever the political outcome, in Vietnam we won every military engagement.

Nope. Iraq is even worse.

More here.