President Bush said this earlier today in his super top-secret visit to Iraq (ahhh... progress):

"General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker tell me if the kind of success we are now seeing continues, it is possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces," he said.

What he really means is that he's too cowardly to reassess the situation strategically and will keep the escalation going until it can't physically be sustained without more unprecedented adjustments. So come August '08 we're looking at one of three situations. One, our Congress will gather up the willpower and begin to confront the President. More likely, two, nothing will happen in Congress. The escalation will continue as it has for months now and there will be little to show for it. As are troop levels begin to fall by the weight of their own gravity, the interests in Iraq will go back to their slightly dormant cycles. Finally three, we could reassess the situation noting the fact that we've rid Iraq of a dictator, established that they have no WMD and planted seeds of democracy in the country (perverted as they might be). Then strategically reset our occupation to one of counterterrorism and regional security leaving the Iraqi power centers room to adjust to their new government without the US military being a crutch. Accompany that with a force to protect the Kurds in the north, keep Turkey at bay, control Kurdish irredentist terrorism emanating from Kurdistan, and check Iranian influence in the northern portion of Iraq. One of these paths is logical (#3) so it won't see the light of day. The rest are just plain bad. However one will allow the White House to save face until we elect a new president. That is the road Bush wants. He claims to be loyal, he claims to support the troops. He is doing neither here, both his party and his military will suffer as a result of his intransigence.

He visited al Anbar to highlight the superficial success happening there against al Qaeda in Iraq. The White House is so desperate to stretch this war out, they'll even hijack the success of others as there own:

That assertion is part of Bush's push to sell Anbar as a success story and to hold it up to his congressional critics as a reason why the troop buildup should not be cut short.

In truth, the progress in Anbar was initiated by the Iraqis themselves, a point Gates himself made, saying the Sunni tribes decided to fight and retake control from al-Qaida many months before Bush decided to send an extra 4,000 Marines to Anbar as part of his troop buildup.

In any regard, this "success" is the fruit of a plan that works against the initial strategic vision of the escalation and one that borders on hypocrisy.

As last months NIE stated:

Such initiatives, if not fully exploited by the Iraqi government, could over time also shift greater power to the regions, undermine efforts to impose central authority, and reinvigorate armed opposition to the Baghdad government

Labels: Anbar, benchmarks, Bush, CAP, counter terrorism, Iraq, surge

Portions of the much awaited report on Iraqi political progress by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, are beginning to leak out. As is painfully obvious, despite minimal results on the military and security front, the political progress has been a disaster. To remind the reader, President Bush's escalation came with 18 benchmarks in which to measure progress. In July, the White House claimed, in error, that "satisfactory performance" was being achieved in 8 of those 18 benchmarks. I opined in a post earlier this month:

If you think back, the July "Initial Benchmark Assessment Report" that claimed that "satisfactory performance" on nearly half of the proposed benchmarks was so fundamentally flawed that I doubt the White House can flaw it any more this time around. They set a fake bar, way too high, and now they won't be able to reach past it while still seeming realistic. They may have burned themselves...

Back in July, this White House spin was promptly debunked as misleading rhetoric.

As predicted here, the White House spin has fallen flat in the face of pragmatic, apolitical analysis. The GAO's report will conclude that not 8 but only 5 of the benchmarks (or is it only 3?) will be met as a result of the Presidents escalation in Iraq.

Congressional auditors have determined that the Iraqi government has failed to meet the vast majority of political and military goals laid out by lawmakers to assess President Bush's Iraq war strategy, The Associated Press has learned.

The Government Accountability Office, or GAO, will report that at least 13 of the 18 benchmarks to measure the surge of U.S. troops to Iraq are unfulfilled ahead of a Sept. 15 deadline for Bush to give a detailed accounting of the situation eight months after he announced the policy, according to three officials familiar with the matter.

Assuming the surge will continue due to a split Congress, a lack of promising alternatives and a President who has already made up his mind, we'll probably ride this out until the definitive timetable sets in early next year and forces our extraction (the realities surfacing as strain in our military). So instead of strategically assessing and addressing failed policy when we could, the 'stay the course' crowd has set us for withdrawal as a broken force with severely limited resources available for the greater threat: al Qaeda proper and their franchise terrorist outfits that plan and recruit with immunity.

Fortunately, the smart folks at the Center for American Progress have inked a last resort plan for strategically removing our troops from the Iraqi morass. Not immediately and not in 4 years but in a span of about a year and with a residual force remaining to address the questions that will remain in the northern Iraq and to confront al Qaeda and other terrorists. They warn that our leaders need to begin planning for this now because if the escalation fulfills the White House's hopes and dreams or is another failure, we need to have a plan to get out. (We've witnessed how military campaigns conducted without plans end up.)

So far I've read the synopsis linked above and have started to make my way through the whole report (.pdf). So far, so good; although I would allow some flexibility with the year time table. Say, to 15 months or so...

Labels: benchmarks, Bush, CAP, GAO, Iraq, surge