NYT: General’s Report on Iraq Progress Has Competition

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Stacking the deck?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/world/middleeast/24policy.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

General’s Report on Iraq Progress Has Competition


By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER
Published: June 24, 2007

WASHINGTON, June 23 — Last month, Congress set a deadline for the American commander in Iraq, declaring that by Sept. 15 he would have to assess progress there before billions more dollars are approved to finance the military effort to stabilize the country. The commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, said in recent days that his report would be only a snapshot of trends, strongly suggesting he will be asking for more time.

But even before he composes the first sentences of the report, to be written with the new American ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan C. Crocker, the administration is commissioning other assessments that could dilute its findings about the impact of the current troop increase. The intent appears to be to give President Bush, who publicly puts great emphasis on listening to his field commanders, a wide range of options.

The assessments are likely to conclude that the Iraqi government has failed to use the troop increase for the purpose the president intended, to strike the political accommodations that he said would stabilize the country. That and other views expected in the various reports could also provide some rationale for beginning a reduction of troops in Iraq under conditions far short of the “victory” Mr. Bush, for the past four years, has said was his ultimate goal. Mr. Bush has used that word with far less frequency recently.

American intelligence agencies, according to senior administration and intelligence officials, are already preparing to submit their own assessment of Iraq’s progress. That is expected to include a judgment about whether Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is willing or capable of striking the kind of Shiite-Sunni political balance Mr. Bush said was the ultimate objective of the American strategy, and whether the passage of political compromises, none of which have yet cleared Parliament, have any hope of reducing the violence. That report will begin circulating, officials said, around the time that General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker arrive in Washington to testify about what the troop increase has accomplished.

Congress has also asked for an independent commission to report on whether the Iraqi security forces are ready to take on the greater role in stabilizing the country that President Bush has talked about since soon after the 2003 invasion. But lawmakers did not mandate who would conduct the assessment, and tellingly, the Pentagon assigned that task to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan Washington policy institute that has regularly published some scholars’ stinging evaluations of strategic blunders in the administration’s strategy.

The commission will be led by Gen. James L. Jones, the retired former supreme allied commander in Europe, who has made little secret of his doubts about whether the current course will succeed, and John J. Hamre, a former deputy defense secretary who led a study mission to Iraq four years ago that offered recommendations that were largely ignored by the White House.

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