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# Posted 11:10 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

JUST BEFORE WE GOT SADDAM, the New Yorker published Sy Hersh's latest dirty-laundry expose about the Pentagon. Its basic message is that American failures in Iraq are pushing the Administration toward adoption of the brutal and self-destructive counter-insurgency methods of the Vietnam era.

According to an unnamed American consultant in Baghdad,

“The only way we can win is to go unconventional. We’re going to have to play their game. Guerrilla versus guerrilla. Terrorism versus terrorism. We’ve got to scare the Iraqis into submission.”

In spite of assembling a number of similar quotes from unnamed sources, Hersh doesn't have much evidence to back up his claim that the United States is about to abandon the civilian-friendly moral high ground.

The low point in Hersh's article is his uncritical quotation of charlatan-slash-turncoat Scott Ritter. While that sort of lapse is noteworthy by itself, the contents of Ritter's quote are especially amusing:

“The high-profile guys around Saddam were the murafaqin, his most loyal companions, who could stand next to him carrying a gun...but now he’s gone to a different tier—the tribes...

Guys like Farouq Hijazi can deliver some of the Baath Party cells, and he knows where some of the intelligence people are. But he can’t get us into the tribal hierarchy.”

Well, evidently someone got us inside whoever it is was guarding Saddam. Now, the fact that we got Saddam doesn't disprove anything Hersh is trying to say. But his willingness to play up worthless sources like Ritter demonstrates how committed he is to portraying the occupation as a failure. Thus, when things go right, committed pessimists like Hersh find it hard to explain how that was possible when we were supposed to be stuck in a quagmire.

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