From last night’s Special Report with Brit Hume:

—On the Iraq Study Group—

MORT KONDRACKE: I would suspect we are not going to have these negotiations with Iran and Syria. As I understand it, [Bush] almost flatly promised Ehud Olmert, the prime minister of Israel, when he was here, that there would not be an international conference that would involve the Israeli-Palestinian issue, as this study group seems to anticipate.
FRED BARNES: Michael Gordon [of the New York Times] talked to all sorts of military experts, including a number that were experts that worked with the Iraq Study Group, and they all said what is recommended, by the study group, can’t work. That you can’t train up an army. You can send in 100,000 trainers, but you can’t change an army and build up an army that is a force like the American army or something like that, inject a culture that’s need there, you can’t do it in 14 months when the idea is that’s when all the combat troops from the U.S. will leave, by the first quarter of 2008.
They all say it just won’t work and that the worst thing we could do is withdraw the combat troops in the first place because they’re the ones, if there’s any hope of securing Baghdad and defeating the terrorists, you have to leave them there.
MARA LIASSON: [Iraqi troops] have more of an alliance or an allegiance to their own sect than they do to some kind of a national army and I don’t know how he’s going to be more successful at training them in the next 14 months than we’ve been in the last three years.
HUME: But they were talking to me yesterday about leaving 70,000 troops there, that would, apparently, not be in major combat roles . . .
KONDRACKE: I think that the idea there would be to diminish American casualties so that the heat would not be on as intensively to withdraw. I think withdrawal is based on the fact that there are Americans getting killed all the time.
LIASSON: I don’t think the American people are rising up against casualties. I think that they’re looking at Iraq and they don’t see success. They see Iraqis killing each other, they don’t see the government coming together, and that’s the problem. I don’t think it’s the casualty level.

—On Hillary and Obama—

KONDRACKE: There was a Gallup poll that indicates that almost 40 percent of Americans think that this country is not ready for either a woman or an African-American.
HUME: That’s what people think about what other people think. That’s not worth much.