No Progress Report

NYT Editorial

With the American public in despair over the Iraq war and key members of his own party deserting him, President Bush is still trying to twist reality to claim that his failed effort is worth sticking with. Yesterday, the White House issued a report card claiming that Iraq’s government had made limited progress on some political and security goals. And Mr. Bush insisted that not only was it not the time to talk about withdrawing American troops, but that he still believes that “the fight can be won.”

That’s been the spin for months. But Bob Woodward reported yesterday in The Washington Post that Mr. Bush’s director of Central Intelligence, Gen. Michael Hayden, warned the bipartisan Iraq Study Group last fall that the “the inability” of the Iraqi government to govern “seems irreversible” and he could not point to “any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around.”

A closer look at Mr. Bush’s hyped report card leads to that same grim conclusion. Eight months after General Hayden issued his warning, the United States still has no effective Iraqi government partner committed to an effective program of national reconciliation and no effective Iraqi military capable of acting independently in the absence of American troops.

Officially, the White House credited the Iraqi government with satisfactory performance on 8 of the 18 listed benchmarks, not considered a passing grade in most tests. And most of the claimed successes were partial, or minor. Even the easy graders at the White House had to conclude that there has not been satisfactory progress toward ensuring that Iraqi forces evenhandedly uphold the law, nor progress toward eliminating militia control of local security, nor progress toward equitable distribution of oil revenues nor toward reforming discriminatory anti-Baathist legislation.

The original point of these benchmarks was to spur recalcitrant Iraqi leaders into taking the steps necessary to rescue their country, and Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy, from the gathering flames of civil war. That is why Congress wanted to link these report cards to a clear threat of scaled-back American support if the Iraqi authorities failed to measure up. Mr. Bush’s veto removed that useful threat, diminishing any real incentive for Iraqis to take the hard steps required. They haven’t, and now America needs to act on its own.

Mr. Bush still refuses to talk about what almost everyone else now understands is essential: the need to develop an orderly plan to extricate American troops from a lost cause and reposition them in ways that can genuinely protect our national interests. A new classified study by the intelligence community offers one more reminder why continued delay and delusion is so dangerous. It says that six years after the Sept. 11 attacks Al Qaeda has rebuilt itself and has settled into safe havens in Pakistan.