The premise is you’ve got two incompetent governments: one is the United States and the other is Iraq. That's not easy to refute.

Lee Hamilton is a former Indiana Congressman, vice-chair of the 9-11 Commission and co-chair of the bi-partisan Iraq Study Group (a.k.a. the Baker-Hamilton commission). He currently is serving as the director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. George Packer interviewed him over the summer in preparation for an article in the current issue of the New Yorker.

Here are some of Hamilton’s remarks:

On the President’s political strategy:

If I were trying to guess it at this point, what I think he would do is try to fudge it. In effect, he’ll let the surge go forward as long as the military can sustain it. Then he will begin to use language that he’s not used before. I don’t know just what that will be, but it will begin to show that he’s receptive to a goal—not a time line—of getting out. He will qualify that, he’ll condition it, in such a way that he will have plenty of flexibility. His supporters will then be able to come back and say, “O.K., the President is telling us he wants to get out of there.” Thus far, he hasn’t given an inch. He’s still saying victory, victory, victory. He talks about Al Qaeda exclusively. Al Qaeda is only part of the problem there—he makes it all of the problem.

On the endgame in Iraq:

The longer you delay in developing a strategy for a responsible exit, the higher the risk of chaos and catastrophe as you withdraw. This is one of the problems with continuing the surge. If you continue the surge, all the focus of the American government will be on the surge, as it has been since the surge was initiated, and that means you are not doing a lot of other things, including how to responsibly withdraw. We have always had the problem of not understanding the necessity of integrating all the tools of American power. We think of it in terms of military, political, diplomatic—the fact of the matter is, you have to do a lot of things, you have to do them all well, and you have to do them urgently in order to succeed. I don’t really know what the President and his Administration are doing, but I personally know of no evidence that they’re planning a different kind of strategy. And when the President is out there constantly repeating the same thing it makes you wonder whether they are discussing anything else other than that, because he’s not given any indication.

On the possibility that Baker-Hamilton is wrong—that there is no “responsible exit” from Iraq:

It is a deeply pessimistic argument about the ability of the Iraqi government to deal with the problems and, in a sense, a deeply pessimistic assessment about our ability to deal with the problems. The premise is that you’ve got two incompetent governments: one is the United States, and the other is Iraq. And the track record makes that not easy to refute.