In Deference to an Expert

I prefer to let the experts expouse on the current goings on--here's one who is hard to refute from the New York Review of Books:

Rory Stewart is chief executive of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a non-profit organization in Kabul devoted to social and urban redevelopment in Afghanistan. A former member of the British Foreign Office, he served, from 2003 to 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq as Deputy Governor of the southern provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar, an experience he described in the book The Prince of the Marshes:

...What would I do in Iraq now? I am not an expert, but I believe that the time has come to withdraw, that our presence is infantilizing the Iraqi political system. That we're like an inadequate antibiotic...

...we have discredited democracy in the eyes of many Iraqis...

...were we to withdraw, things would improve....

... there is simply no point hanging around. It would seem to me that starting to leave tomorrow, as opposed to in two years' time or six years' time, would make no difference; the situation would be the same. And there cannot be a justification for continuing, day by day, to kill Iraqis and to have our own soldiers killed in this kind of war....

OK this guy was on the ground living in Iraq and working with the powers that be--can anyone get me a better source? Is George Bush and his cry of terrorism in our midst, in a speech to the Coast Guard Academy really going to trump reality in a foreign land?