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Here's the good news and the bad news: Seymour Hersh doesn't think the United States can pull out of Iraq right away. The reason? Because doing so would turn a disaster into ... what's the level of disasterness beyond disaster?

"It's all going to go to hell," Hersh said today, while he was picking up the William Allen White journalism award at the University of Kansas.

Now it's likely that if you know Seymour Hersh's name, you either adore him or hold him in utter contempt. Back in Vietnam, he won the Pulitzer for telling the world about the My Lai massacre.

And more recently, he grabbed the world's attention by being one of the first reporters to bring news of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal to public attention. For his fans (mostly on the left), Hersh is the ultimate "speak truth to power" kind of guy; critics (mostly on the right) say he plays loose with the facts, generally to the detriment of America's security and image in the world.

And it's fair to say he doesn't think much of the current administration. If you know Hersh, you knew that already. But if you didn't, well, here's how he opened up his speech at KU today:

"By my count, there's 347 days left in the reign of King George II," he said. So clearly, Hersh isn't the kind of detached reporter who at least tries to disguise his opinions: They're all out there on his sleeve, throbbing with righteous anger. This kind of stuff is off-putting to his detractors; during the short question-and-answer session today, one man challenged Hersh: Why so much attention in Vietnam to MyLai and not, say, the Hue Massacre, in which Communists executed thousands of South Vietnamese men, women and children. Hersh didn't agree with that assessment, saying that Hue got a fair amount of attention once the dimensions became known.

His questioner didn't agree.

"You made a lot of money on My Lai and nobody made money on Hue, and I was wondering why," the challenger said.

It wasn't Hersh's reply that surprised me, but the tone. It was surprisingly gentle -- given his prickly reputation -- even as it was reproachful.

"You don't mean that," Hersh told his challenger. Although, it must be said, the man clearly did mean that.

About President Bush, though, Hersh was less gentle, and even a little mean -- although he doesn't ascribe cynical motives to the president.

"I think Bush believed what he believed. Actually, I don't know if he does things because his father didn't, because God told him to, or because it's the 13th step in the 12-step program," he said. Bush's presidency, he said, is the most revolutionary and radical of modern times. "And there's nothing more dangerous than a radical who is uneducable."

And that leads us back to Iraq. Hersh, it seems, is a fan of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, calling them good men -- but likened their jobs to undertakers putting rouge on a corpse. That will last, he said, only until the election. That leaves Iraq for the next president. But it will be impossible to pull out quickly, he said, no matter what Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama say on the campaign trail.

"It's not that simple," he said. "It's not a question of American honor. American honor has pretty much been devalued the last seven years. It's just not as simple as pulling out -- there will be a civil war."