Peter Arnett could give Helen Thomas a run for her money as the most anti-Bush, anti-”neocon” journalist.

MRC’s Brent Baker reports that Arnett told Craig Ferguson on Tuesday night’s Late Late Show on CBS that he decided to stay in Baghdad because he presumed the U.S. would win quickly. But “this war is going on much longer than I thought — it’s two years with no end in sight.” Arnett characterized the battle as “less a war than a sort of a coup d’etat because there was very little resistance from the Iraqi army.” He asserted that Iraq is “on the brink of civil war” and that far from being the “Hitler of the Middle East” as U.S. “propaganda” had suggested, he found Saddam Hussein “to be a very elegant, diplomatic guy.” Arnett also contended the war was unnecessary because Hussein and his two sons “were squabbling for power and really, even if there hadn’t been a U.S. invasion, Saddam was on the way out.”