ISG the laughing stock of Company B

When even the New York Times can’t find one of its military analysts or leakers to say anything good about the Iraq Study Group’s military recommendations, you’ve gotta know there’s no there there, as much as the NYT's would love to cut-and-run.

The NYT’s report, “Will it work on the battlefield?”, says:

The military recommendations issued yesterday by the Iraq Study Group are based more on hope than history and run counter to assessments made by some of its own military advisers….

Indeed:

Jack Keane, the retired Army chief of staff who served on the group’s panel of military advisers, described that goal as entirely impractical. “Based on where we are now we can’t get there,” General Keane said in an interview, adding that the report’s conclusions say more about “the absence of political will in Washington than the harsh realities in Iraq.”

But, that didn’t stop the senile sage retreads (average age 70+) of the ISG:

The group’s final military recommendations were not discussed with the retired officers who serve on the group’s “Military Senior Adviser Panel” before publication, several of those officers said….

“They came up with a political thought but then got to tinkering with tactical ideas that in my view don’t make any sense,” General McCaffrey said. “This is a recipe for national humiliation.”…

A preface to the report by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, the group’s co-chairmen, said that one aim of the report was “to move our country toward consensus.” The study contains all the ingredients of a Washington compromise. What is less apparent is a detailed and convincing military strategy that is likely to work in Iraq.

The ISG report contains a few grains but is mostly dangerous chaff.

Dangerous to the U.S., the MidEast, and potentially fatal to Israel.