Guess what? The American public is about to get sandbagged again. The latest "gotcha" from George W. Bush is backing down from his good faith agreement to allow a September assessment by General Petraeus to be the basis for evaluating the progress of the surge. Instead the White House is censoring the Petraeus evaluation and issuing its own report card on Iraq.
The Washington Post reported that the much anticipated September report on the progress of the surge will not be authored by General Petraeus, but instead the report document will be an evaluation of surge progress written by the White House P.R. Department:
From the Washington Post
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden wants an open hearing" with Petraeus. (D-Del.) told the White House that Bush's presentation plan was unacceptable. An aide to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said"we are in talks with the administration and Senator Levin wants an open hearing" with Petraeus.
Those positions only hardened yesterday with reports that the document would not be written by the Army general but instead would come from the White House, with input from Petraeus, Crocker and other administration officials.
So the Team Bush plan is to censor the Petraeus report and write a fantasy evaluation of its own progress. Of course the Bush administration will do nothing but praise itself for "turning the corner" in the war in Iraq and recommend a continuation of the surge. Bush plans to ignore warnings that the surge is compromising the Army's mission readiness and eroding the morale of the troops, who are facing battle fatigue as nearly every soldier currently in Iraq has done multiple tours of combat duty in the war.
For a real summary of our progress in Iraq see this article by Peter Beaumont of the UK Guardian. Beaumont has been embedded for two months with U.S units in Baghdad and Mosul and says that battle fatigue is crippling the performance of American soldiers in Iraq. In his shocking dispatch to the U.K. Guardian Beaumont writes:
A week later, in the northern city of Mosul, an officer talks privately. 'We're plodding through this,' he says after another patrol and another ambush in the city centre. 'I don't know how much more plodding we've got left in us.' When the soldiers talk like this there is resignation.
There is a corrosive anger, too, that bubbles out, like the words pouring unbidden from a chaplain's assistant who has come to bless a patrol. 'Why don't you tell the truth? Why don't you journalists write that this army is exhausted?'
The White House seems blissfully unaware of the collapse in morale. The administration is so hell-bent on "supporting" the troops the Bush administration is ignoring the fact that soldiers to collapsing on the battlefield from the stress of doing multiple tours of duty in Iraq.
To assure that General Petraeus' evaluation never reaches the ears of the American public, the White House is planning to order any congressional testimony by Petraeus to be conducted in secrecy and kept off the public record.
Huh?... I thought Bush said he was "following the advice of the generals" in Iraq."
Bush can no longer claim that he's supporting the troops by listening to the advice of the generals, if he's censoring their progress reports and ordering them to refuse to make public comments about the lack of progress in Iraq.
The Iraq war is no longer about WMD, terrorism, national security, protecting Americans or even about oil. It's all about George W. Bush! The only reason Bush is pushing to renew the surge is his own personal vanity and his need to protect his presidential legacy, not protect Americans from terrorism.