That's of Nibras Kazimi view anyway, a Hudson Institute visiting scholar and New York Sun journalist. The Iraq Study Group is a congressionally mandated, bi-partisan commission charged with reporting on America's future Iraq strategy. The commission is chaired by Republican former secretary of state James A. Baker III and Democratic former congressman Lee H. Hamilton (Ind.).

If he's right, the emerging Iraq consensus of progressives--a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops and reinvigorated diplomatic efforts--is nothing more than false hope.

Iraq's main problem, according to Kazimi, is extremism--with Baathists on one side and Islamist jihadists on the other. While sectarian violence a "poison" plaguing Iraq, he urged listeners not to forget "[t]here's still a lot of glue that's holding Iraq together." (The event can be watch in its entirety on C-Span.)

Kazimi went on to call the Iraq Study Group's mission "silly" and "unfeasible."

Kazimi takes the Iraq Study Group to task for adopting two misguided strategies--engaging the Iraqi insurgency and looking to other Middle Eastern countries to support the embattled Iraqi regime.

According to Kazimi, the Iraq Study Group cannot place any hope in diplomatically engaging the two main threats to Iraq--the Baahist insurgency and hard-line jihadists:

These two big groups, the Saddamists and the insurgents, cannot be talked to. Even if you give them an amnesty they don't care. They are holding onto fantasies...[and] they think they're winning.

And these are the ones that matter. The others that show up really don't matter.

The Iraq Study Group's hope to use Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran to stabilize Iraq, as recently alluded to by its Chairman, Kazimi finds just as unlikely. Suggesting that these regimes might very well collapse within the next fifty years, Kazimi considered support from these "not very stable regimes" a failing policy.

Kamizi and Abdel Aziz al Wandawi, Director General of Information for the Higher National Commission for De-Baathification in Iraq, were the featured speakers at a Hudson Institute discussion on Iraq's future. The Hudson Institute is home to many prominent neoconservatives, including Norman Podhoretz.

The event's panelists espoused a divergent, and minority view on the causes of Iraq's miseries--at least within the United States.

Both speakers viewed the American-led coalition forces as the key to success in Iraq. Without more time to develop fledgling but, in their view, improving security forces, Islamist extremists may take control of Iraq. And such a state, in Kazimi's view, would only continue its assault on Western values and all non-Islamic fundamentalist nations.

This view, which places Islamic terrorism as the central cause of Iraq's troubles, mirrors the position of the White House and President George W. Bush.

But this month's midterm elections have put Bush's--and his Iraq policy-- on the defensive. With voters awarding Democrats Congressional majorities for the first time in twelve years, Bush has appeared to shift his Iraq strategy. Bush announced the replacement of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld with Peter Pace, a member of the Iraq Study Group, one day after the midterm elections.

Yet no comprehensive alternative to America's current policy in Iraq has won public support. (But proposals abound.)

The discussion reflected the mounting tension of this impasse, with an argument breaking out between two of the event's attendees.

Peter Prost, a former CIA official and current private consultant (who has faced allegations of misconduct), ridiculed the panelists' perspective on Iraq. Claiming "perception is reality," he argued that the American public will inevitably demand a retreat from Iraq, since the perception that America is losing has already taken hold. He therefore concluded Iraq is another Vietnam: a civil conflict where America's best policy is a quick exit.

Unsatisfied by the speakers' responses he reiterated his diatribe, at which point another attendee, Hillel Fradkin, took it on himself to defend the panelists:

The question here...was what was the situation in Iraq [not America's willingness to continue the mission]. If the situation in Iraq is what they describe it behooves us to appreciate that. We may draw the same, and indeed false, conclusion that we drew in 1968 [that the Tet Offensive demanded America withdraw from Vietnam].

The spirited defense came from an unlikely source: an advisor to the Iraq Study Group--the very group called "silly" by one of the panelists.

But on the other hand, Fradkin is a Hudson Institute senior fellow.

Earlier Fradkin commented on Kazimi's appraisal of the Iraq Study Group:

Some of the ideas you [Kazimi] mentioned earlier, which [have]...been floated for American policy to approach [Iraq] have a character of fantasy and unreality that you attributed to them.