The growing chorus of neocon attacks on the Iraq Study Group was bolstered by the Wall Street Journal this morning, in an editorial called "The Iraq Muddle Group." It is important because it poses in clear terms the neocon counterview on Iraq, namely, that the United States has to support the sectarian Shiite government of Iraq in a renewed war against Sunni insurgents.

The Journal calls for "strong support for Baghdad's Shiite-led government coalition" against "the main enemy ... the Sunni terrorists. They can't be appeased." It backs those in the Bush administration, including (reportedly) Philip Zelikow, the just-resigned State Department counselor, who support the "80 percent solution," that is, all-out U.S. support for the Shiite-Kurdish alliance against the Sunnis.

It should be noted that this is contradicted by the main thrust of the Baker-Hamilton group, which argues for renewed efforts at national reconciliation in Iraq, tied to diplomacy with Iraq's neighbors, and which calls for open dialogue between the United States and its opponents in Iraq. The United States, said the ISG, "must also try to talk directly to Muqtada al-Sadr, to militia leaders, and to insurgent leaders."

Now, the fact that the ISG wants to triple or quadruple U.S. training of the Iraqi armed forces is a dumb idea, since those armed forces are almsot entirely made up of Kurdish pesh merga and Shiite militiamen. My own belief is, that long before we can train and equip Iraq's rag-tag army, we'll be on our way out of Iraq. No serious analyst things that the United States can train Iraqi forces by 2008. (Anthony Cordesman of CSIS: "There is no meaningful plan for creating a mix of effective Iraqi military forces, police forces, governance, and criminal justice system at any point in the near future, much less by 2008.") Really, and truly, it is game over in Iraq.