Not so rosy behind the scenes

Kevin Drum points us to an admission by Hardball's Chris Matthews that the picture the White House mouthpieces paint while on camera, is much different from the story they describe after the camera stops rolling.

A little more realism, (assuming this is real document, it came from a right wing warmonger's site), can be found in this Memo to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from General Barry McCaffrey's Trip to Iraq. A couple of highlights.

5. The Enemy Threat: 1st - The Iraqi Insurgency threat is enormously more complex than Vietnam.

...We must continue to level with the American people. We still have a five year fight facing us in Iraq.

3rd - The Fallujah Situation: The city has huge symbolic importance throughout Mideast. Unrealistic expectations were raised on how rapidly the Coalition could rebuild.

The City appears to be an angry disaster. Money doesn't rebuild infrastructure - bulldozers and workers and cement do. The Coalition needs an Iraqi/Coalition effort principally executed by military engineers --and thousands of Iraqi workers--to re-build the City. We need a "Pierre L'Enfant" of Fallujah.

6. Coalition Public Diplomacy Policy is a disaster: 1st - The US media is putting the second team in Iraq with some exceptions. Unfortunately, the situation is extremely dangerous for journalists.

The working conditions for a reporter are terrible. They cannot travel independently of US military forces without risking abduction or death. In some cases, the press has degraded to reporting based on secondary sources, press briefings which they do not believe, and alarmist video of the aftermath of suicide bombings obtained from Iraqi employees of unknown reliability.

It ends with impossible rosy predictions for success if we just "stay the course" and get through the dark and difficult days of the next 5 years. Unfortunately it's all predicated on criteria that can never be met while we remain in occupation of the country.