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You Call That Progress?The outrageous White House report on Iraq.

By Fred KaplanPosted Thursday, July 12, 2007, at 5:47 PM ET

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Or Benchmark No. 9: "Providing three trained and ready Iraqi brigades to support Baghdad operations." The report admits, "Manning levels for deploying units continues to be of concern." The report doesn't explain what this means—namely, that Iraq's brigades have only 50 percent to 75 percent of their soldiers. And yet it concludes that the Iraqi government has made "satisfactory progress" because it "has provided" the brigades.

Then there's Benchmark No. 12: "Ensuring that … the Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of sectarian or political affiliation." The report admits this task "remains a significant challenge" in "some parts of Baghdad." However, it claims "satisfactory progress" because U.S. commanders report "overall satisfaction with their ability to target any and all extremist groups" and because U.S. diplomats, in their talks with Iraqi officials, "continue to stress the importance" of the topic.

The good mark for Benchmark No. 17 is particularly dubious: "Allocating and spending $10 billion in Iraqi revenues for reconstruction projects, including delivery of essential services, on an equitable basis." The report admits that the Iraqi government has spent only 22 percent of its capital budget, that "it remains unclear" whether the oil ministry has "made any real effort" to spend its share of the funds, that it's hard to track the budget, and that the effects of new spending are felt "unevenly." Still, it claims "satisfactory progress" because some of the revenue is dribbling into the economy.

The other four "satisfactory" grades concern purely procedural matters. They assess legislation on "procedures to form semi-autonomous regions" (not on whether the regions have been formed); "establishing … political, media, economic, and service committees in support of the Baghdad Security Plan" (not whether their support has been effective); "establishing … joint security stations in neighborhoods across Baghdad" (not whether they're effective, either); and "ensuring that the rights of minority political parties in the Iraqi legislature are protected" (not in Iraqi society).

The report card was rigged from the outset by how the White House defined "satisfactory."

The legislation required the president to submit a report "declaring, in his judgment, whether satisfactory progress toward meeting these benchmarks is, or is not, being achieved."

The White House report states, "In order to make this judgment … we … asked the following question: As measured from a January 2007 baseline, do we assess that present trend data demonstrates a positive trajectory, which is tracking toward satisfactory accomplishment in the near term? If the answer is yes, we have provided a 'Satisfactory' assessment; if the answer is no, the assessment is 'Unsatisfactory.' " (All italics added.)

Subtle but pernicious wordplay is going on here. "Satisfactory progress" toward a benchmark is very different from "a positive trajectory … toward satisfactory accomplishment." The congressional language requires a satisfactory degree of progress. The White House interpretation allows high marks for the slightest bit of progress—the "positive trajectory" could be an angstrom, as long as it's "tracking toward" the goal; the degree of progress doesn't need to be addressed.

Yet even by this extraordinarily lenient standard, the White House authors could not bring themselves to give a passing grade to the Iraqi government on half of the benchmarks—and the most important benchmarks, at that.

This is no academic matter. As President Bush and Gen. David Petraeus have said many times, the point of the surge and its strategy is to make Baghdad secure, so that Iraq's political leaders have the "breathing room" to resolve their disputes. Yet if they are incapable of resolving their disputes—if they have made no measurable progress on the major issues and if the Iraqi military hasn't advanced much either—then the surge may be a hopeless cause. Certainly, members of Congress are right to question the strategy, and Bush is deceptive in dismissing their challenges out of hand.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed. He can be reached at .

Photograph of George Bush by Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

I'm truly grateful to Kaplan and other honest journalists for cataloguing yet another example of semantic games and deceit from the Bush administration. But it's getting to be such old news by now. When is it ever not the case? What else can anyone do about it? When does anybody face consequences for having lied or for making a stupid decision?

In its brutal inevitability, the news from the Bush administration is like watching "I, Claudius," that great old serial epic about the depravity and treachery of ancient Rome, on TV. We all know that Rome is going to burn in the end, that it's the way it was and always will be, and that we're pretty much helpless spectators to the whole tawdry debacle. Can 2009 and a new administration possibly get here fast enough?

--fingerpuppet

(To reply, click here.)

When was the last time you heard a general say, "Well, we really screwed up, and our mission failed miserably! It's just not going to work!" Does anyone, anywhere, expect that Petraeus and the president are going to say in September anything except, "We just need more time. We can't set any deadlines."

--StevieB

(To reply, click here.)

Our own government routinely fails to make any progress on even simple issues, let alone complex issues. By Kaplan's standard's, our government would largely be seen as a failure.

During our nation's beginning, it took years - and two constitutions - to resolve the myriad issues in our country. And, even then they still festered for decades until our own Civil War.

Let's face it folks, if you thought we could be out of Iraq in anything less than 15 years, you were kidding yourself. You better hitch 'em up for the long haul.

--lightray9a

(To reply, click here.)

How much time does this moron need? How much money? How many troops need to die in a pointless war with no measurable means of determining "victory?"

We have picked one side of a civil war and there is little or no relevance to the safety of the United States involved at all. Bush had to lie to make the threat credible and now we see that Saddam had been beaten down to nothing in the first Gulf War. With Saddam dead, a civil war now exists with no clear front runner.

Like Iraq, Vietnam was never a real threat the USA but there was a fear that if one side of the civil war got into power there might then be a threat. Interestingly enough, the wrong side won and not only did they not represent a threat to the USA, but they are now doing a ton of business with the USA....so much for the Domino Theory.

The USA cannot be in the business of controlling who runs other countries-this is what empires do-and is that what we are or what we want to be? We can and should have a strong defense, but this should not be a strategy of controlling other nations and peoples by proxy

--RMLReturns

(To reply, click here.)

(7/15)

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