Pillars of the news media and foreign policy establishment were scolded Wednesday night on ABC by Jack Keane, a retired four-star General and former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, who asserted both are living “in the past” in their pessimistic warnings about Iraq. Fareed Zakaria, Editor of Newsweek International, had asserted that “the American Army has presided over the largest ethnic cleansing in the world since the Balkans.” For World News, anchor Charles Gibson gathered Zakaria, Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Keane to assess the road ahead in Iraq. Zakaria charged: “One of the dirty little secrets about Iraq is that Iraq has increasingly been ethnically cleansed. It's sad to say, but the American Army has presided over the largest ethnic cleansing in the world since the Balkans. When people say bad things are going to happen if we leave, bad things have already happened. Where were you for the last four years?” Haass maintained: “We should be realistic. Iraq is likely to be a messy and slightly dysfunctional country for the foreseeable future.”

Keane pounced: “Both of you are really not describing what's happening in Iraq. I mean, you're in the past, to be quite frank about it. The Sunni insurgency has gone through a conversion. They have thrown the towel in. They have now saddled up along side of us...”

ABCNews.com has posted a transcript of the entire session which includes portions not aired.

Back in 2005, Zakaria highlighted a description of President Bush as a less rational “Ayatollah.”

The February 2, 2005 MRC CyberAlert recounted:

Prompting cheers from the audience, on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, Zakaria passed along how an Iraqi politician told him that "there are two Grand Ayatollahs running Iraq: Bush and Sistani -- and Sistani seems the more rational."...

...[I]n a discussion about how the Shia have refrained from attacking Sunnis, Stewart described Ayatollah Sistani as "seemingly a very reasonable man."

That cued Zakaria, a regular panelist on ABC's This Week, to recall: "He seems to be a very reasonable guy. There's an Iraqi politician who said to me, I quote him in last week's column, he said 'there are two grand Ayatollahs running Iraq: Bush and Sistani and Sistani seems the more rational.'"...

He did indeed conclude an article, in the January 24 Newsweek, with the same anecdote he recounted on the Daily Show: "In the words of one of his [Sistani's] aides, 'the representation of our Sunni brethren in the coming government must be effective, regardless of the results of the elections.' As an Iraqi politician said to me, 'There are currently two Grand Ayatollahs running Iraq: Sistani and Bush. Most of us feel that Sistani is the more rational.'"

The MRC's Brad Wilmouth provided these highlights from what aired on the September 5 World News on ABC:

CHARLES GIBSON: So let's frame this around two central questions: How do we leave, and when do we start? First of all, is the President right that leaving would be a disaster?

RETIRED GENERAL JACK KEANE: Well, I think leaving precipitously before we have the kind of security that we have to have in place would clearly be a disaster -- particularly now, when we've made some significant progress. Precipitous withdrawal makes no sense in my judgement, and what we should do is begin to leave, and then go back to the pre-surge level forces. I think we can do that in '08 for sure.

...

GIBSON: If we go through some sort of a reduction strategy, are we opening things up for some kind of genocide, ethnic cleansing, that will go on, and we'll simply have 50, 60, 70,000 troops standing by and watching this?

FAREED ZAKARIA, NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL: No, because one of the dirty little secrets about Iraq is that Iraq has increasingly been ethnically cleansed. It's sad to say, but the American Army has presided over the largest ethnic cleansing in the world since the Balkans. When people say bad things are going to happen if we leave, bad things have already happened. Where were you for the last four years?

RICHARD HAASS, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: But we should be realistic. Iraq is likely to be a messy and slightly dysfunctional country for the foreseeable future.

KEANE: Both of you are really not describing what's happening in Iraq. I mean, you're in the past, to be quite frank about it. The Sunni insurgency has gone through a conversion. They have thrown the towel in. They have now saddled up along side of us, and they want to protect their communities, but they don't want separate militia to do it. They're going to do it as members of the Iraqi security forces, which is very, very encouraging.

—Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center