Why are Retired Gen. William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, Retired Gen. Joseph Hoare, the former Marine commandant and head of the U.S. Central Command, and W. Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, and the top expert on Iraq there, such pessimistic left-lib pinko commie traitors?

Odom: "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." He added: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving [Osama] bin Laden's ends."

Hoare: "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."

Terrill: "I don't think that you can kill the insurgency."