A couple of days ago, the NYT reported that the White House "is growing more confident that it can beat back efforts by Congressional Democrats to shift course in Iraq." It’s not because conditions in Iraq have improved, and it’s not because the president’s policy is producing results, but because the administration has "a sense the dynamic has changed."
It’s all about some amorphous "sense" that’s entirely independent of reality. Consider what we’ve learned this week. The GAO prepared a "strikingly negative" assessment of conditions on the ground, with no political progress (the intended point of the "surge") and little evidence of reduced violence. Of the 18 Iraqi benchmarks, Bush’s policy has come up short on 15. An independent federal commission believes Iraq’s 26,000-member national police force is beyond repair and might need to be disbanded altogether. A working draft of a secret document prepared by the U.S. embassy in Baghdad shows that the Maliki government is rotten to the core. Iraqi civilian deaths are getting worse, not better. The latest data shows U.S. troop fatalities worse every month this year compared to the same months last year. A smidgeon of evidence pointing to at least marginal political progress late last week turned out to be smoke and mirrors.
It’s against this backdrop that the White House and its conservative allies boast, "See? This is the progress we’ve been waiting for." More importantly, the conventional wisdom in DC is suddenly in agreement that they’re right.
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