[JOHN] ROBERTS [CNN ANCHOR, THIS WEEK AT WAR]: Thursday Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that there was a great reluctance to indulge in happy talk about the security situation in Iraq and that it could be months before any real progress is seen there. In military terms in political terms, can the administration wait that long?.. With me here in Washington in the studio, [is] Flynt Leverett. He's the former Middle East analyst on the national security council, now a senior fellow with the New America Foundation...

ROBERTS: Flynt Leverett, John McCain went out [to Baghdad], but he went out surrounded by 100 soldiers, couple of helicopters flying overhead, snipers on the rooftops. Did he do any favors for his argument that things are getting better in Iraq by going out there with all these people and then coming back and saying, success.

FLYNT LEVERETT, NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION: I don't think so. It really came across as kind of a Potemkin (ph) village exercise. The media went out the next day and interviewed vendors, people who live in the neighborhood and the general thrust of the interviews is McCain is crazy to say things are as good as he described them. I don't think it played very well for him...

ROBERTS: So Flynt, the interior minister saying, don't pull the troops out because we couldn't sustain security here. Does this so- called surge need to be given a chance without all this heated political rhetoric surrounding it?

LEVERETT: One could make that argument but one could also make an argument that the surge is not really addressing any of the fundamental security and political dynamics in Iraq, that it may have caused some of the militias to pull out of Baghdad, may have caused some of the militias to go to ground in Baghdad but you see, violence continuing outside of Baghdad, U.S. and coalition casualties continuing at significant levels. And in a way, this surge is really just, in a way, is filling time.

ROBERTS: What's the alternative, give up?

LEVERETT: I think the alternative is to adopt a new strategy that is going to recognize that Iraq ultimately develops along regional and largely along ethnic and sectarian lines. And that this whole idea of creating a national security infrastructure in an environment like this is probably doomed to failure. And we're going to have to start building both security and political structures at a regional level...

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