Today’s Must ReadFirst was the war over the benchmarks. Now there’s the war for whose benchmarks really mark the benches.
In May, Congress mandated that the Government Accountability Office produce an assessment of whether the U.S. and the Iraqi government are meeting eighteen indicators of political, economic and military progress in Iraq. Unlike the analysis produced by the Bush administration — preliminarily delivered in July, and to be finalized by September 15 — the GAO study has to give a stark yes-or-no answer for the achievement of each so-called benchmark. Sure enough, a draft of the study, leaked to The Washington Post, finds that only three of the eighteen benchmarks have been met — while the July White House assessment said about half of them had been.
As the Post reports, the GAO report casts doubt on whether progress is being achieved in several of the areas the Bush administration has highlighted. July’s White House report, for example, cited “an overall decrease in sectarian violence” in Baghdad. The GAO, by contrast, finds that “the average number of daily attacks against civilians remained about the same over the last six months; 25 in February versus 26 in July.” The Iraqi security forces remain dysfunctional: the GAO cites pervasive sectarianism in the Iraqi Army units sent to Baghdad for the surge, while the White House called their performance “satisfactory.”
Politically, the Iraqi government — and politics more broadly — is a shambles. The only indicator of political progress cited by the GAO is a measure providing protection for the rights of minorities in the legislature. There’s nothing but failure on constitutional reform (“satisfactory,” said the White House), oil-revenue distribution (“the current status is unsatisfactory, but it is too early to tell”), and de-Baathification (not satisfactory).
And then there’s this highly significant tidbit. On Monday, President Bush gave a speech praising a recent accord among the Shiite and Kurdish political parties of Nouri al-Maliki’s government — which has no Sunnis, who, along with the Sadrists, have withdrawn from the cabinet — pledging to play nicer with the Sunnis. (Tariq al-Hashemi’s Iraqi Islamic Party, a leading Sunni political entity, signed the accord, but hasn’t brought his party back into the government and the other Sunnis doubt Maliki’s sincerity.) The cost-free accord for Maliki smelled a lot like an illusory political deal intended to bolster the Petraeus/Crocker assessments next month to Congress. Sure enough, the GAO finds that Bush’s public statements about political progress by the Maliki government are entirely contradicted by internal studies:
An internal administration assessment this month, the GAO says, concluded that “this [Sunni] boycott ends any claim by the Shi’ite-dominated coalition to be a government of national unity.” An administration official involved in Iraq policy said that he did not know what specific interagency document the GAO was citing but noted that it is an accurate reflection of the views of many officials.
Along with an independent assessment of the Iraqi security forces, led by distinguished retired Marine General Jim Jones, the GAO report will be delivered to Congress next week. Post reporters Karen DeYoung and Tom Ricks got a leaked draft, they write, from “a government official who feared that its pessimistic conclusions would be watered down in the final version — as some officials have said happened with security judgments in this month’s National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.” (Petraeus reportedly “softened” last week’s NIE.)
But even if the report stands as it is in the draft, it’s not hard to see what the White House response to the GAO will be. Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council, questioned the report’s methodology: “it’s not surprising the GAO would make this assessment, given the difficult congressionally mandated measurement they had to follow.” In other words, it’s problematic for the GAO to give an yea-or-nay assessment of conditions in Iraq. This from a president who famously said he doesn’t “do nuance.”
