A compilation of recent news you may or may not have seen regarding America's most disastrous war

Funny thing about this war: no matter how much the Bushies keep trying to conceal, suppress, distort, and spin positive, the grim truth about what's happening in Iraq keeps leaking into their own documents:

* The Congressionally mandated White House progress report on the escalation, er, "surge," proclaims that the Iraq government is "satisfactory" in only eight of 18 benchmarks--and the least important ones, at that--and that's only with a generous definition of "satisfactory." ("Progress" was redefined to essentially mean "there's an indication that at some future date there might be a process to facilitate progress.")

* A declassified National Intelligence Estimate, despite not mentioning Iraq and trying its best to polish the turd that is the Global War on Terror, concluded that Al Qaeda has been rejuvenated by the American occupation of Iraq and is now at least as strong and widespread as it was at the time of 9-11.

(In an effort to bury this bad news, the next day the US military in Baghdad just happened to announce that two weeks previously it'd captured a top Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQII) leader, and he just happened to confess to a greater level of coordination between AQII and the global Al Qaeda, right in line with the official White House line. I'm sure all interrogation techniques were well within the guidelines set forth in the president's signing statement on torture and his new executive order allowing the CIA to torture.)

* In a patented White House Friday Afternoon News Dump, where the Bush administration routinely tries to quietly bury unflattering news, Gen. Peter Pace announced that the number of battle-ready Iraqi battalions able to fight independently dropped from 10 to six in recent months despite increased US training efforts. Pace spun the bad news as not something to be "overly concerned" about, because it was partly attributable to losses in the field: "As units operate in the field, they have casualties, they consume vehicles and equipment." Forty percent losses due to casualties or "consumed" vehicles and equipment???

* Somebody's got to be planning for the end of the (US) war: at the same time that a Pentagon political appointee was accusing Sen. Hillary Clinton of aiding the enemy by asking what the contingency plans were for a US withdrawal, a report was quietly published on a recent US military war game which showed that, contrary to White House warnings, a US withdrawal from Iraq would not be catastrophic. It anticipated that Sunnis would largely be forced to migrate to the west of Iraq, a Shiite civil war would erupt in the south, and northern Kurds would invite US forces to help protect their borders, effectively splitting the country. So one branch of the government tells Sen. Clinton she's treasonous, and another says the scenario she wants to know about is no big deal. That's the difference between military professionals and political hacks.

More signs of the wheels falling off: the Army fell 15 percent short of its June recruiting goal, and the Pentagon has extended the tours of 2,200 Marines an extra month, through September. By remarkable coincidence, that's when a report to Congress on the efficacy of the escalation, er, "surge," is due. Although Iraq field commander Gen. Petraeus is now saying, "Well, maybe November..."

Congress isn't buying it. The House voted this month to require Iraq troop withdrawal within 120 days. Seventy House members (including Seattle's Rep. Jim McDermott, but no other Washington state members) sent a strongly worded letter to President Bush last week announcing they would no longer vote for any money for the war. A CBS poll last week showed only 28 percent of Americans want Congress to fund the war without condition, so it's not as though they're going out on a limb.

Republicans continued to defect: Senior defense experts John Warner (R-VA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) introduced a bill with a new war authorization and requiring "contingency plans" for withdrawal. It's not very good but marks the first Republican congressional bill breaking with the White House on the war. And Olympia Snowe (R-ME) announced she would back a bill to order troops out of Iraq. But: Senate Republicans killed (via filibuster) a bill to require more rest between deployments of soldiers to Iraq and strict limits on National Guard and reserve deployments. And they also blocked a plan to end the war attached to the defense appropriations bill after an all-night filibuster. Weren't these the same guys threatening to abolish filibusters, aka the "nuclear option," 18 months ago?

At least someone's planning ahead: Seven Sunni insurgent groups have formed a political front for negotiating with the US for the withdrawal of our troops. Sunni political parties and followers of Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr have ended their five-week boycott of Iraq's Parliament, though their boycott of the Cabinet continues. Their return gives weight to the movement to hold a no-confidence vote on Prime Minister al-Maliki's government. It probably also dooms the give-all-Iraqi-oil-to-American-companies law the US is desperately trying to ram through the Parliament (aka "benchmark") before it adjourns for the rest of the summer. (There have also been massive public rallies in Iraq in the last two weeks against both Maliki and the oil law.) And before you join the chorus of American pundits sneering at the Iraqi parliament for taking time off at such a critical point, remember that it hits 120 degrees in Baghdad regularly in summer, and thanks to the Americans, most of the country has little or no electricity, let alone air conditioning.

Besides, George Bush's vacations are longer.

Another simmering crisis: Turkey has amassed 140,000 troops on the Kurdish northern Iraq border in preparation for an incursion or invasion in pursuit of Kurdish separatist guerrillas the Iraqi Kurds have been sheltering. (How that post 9-11 doctrine of "invading countries that harbor terrorists" comes back to haunt...) Last week Turkey, a NATO ally that gets lots of US weaponry, shelled Iraqi border regions. The prospect of a US ally attacking America's closest (if not only) ally in Iraq is truly messy.

The General Accounting Office (GAO) reports that Pentagon logistics are a mess. Among their examples: the Pentagon cannot account for the whereabouts of over 54,000 shipping containers sent to Iraq. Meanwhile, the Inspector General of the Dept. of Defense, in a scathing report, revealed that the Pentagon awarded sole-bid armor contracts to companies it knew didn't deliver on time, putting troops at risk. The report did not examine why those companies were chosen. Were they, for example, members of the Pioneer Club?

Not unconnected: the Congressional Research Service reports that with the new appropriations bill, the war in Iraq has now cost up to $567 billion. That doesn't count future veterans' benefit and health care costs, interest on the debt being racked up, lost economic productivity by reservists sent to Iraq, and so on; that brings the bill well over two trillion dollars.

Remember that idiotic trench the military dug around Baghdad to keep the bad guys out--no, in--no, out? It worked so well that the military is now proposing to dig another one, around Kirkuk.

Marine Cpl. Trent Thomas was convicted last week of kidnapping and conspiracy to murder (but somehow acquitted of the charge of murder itself) in the killing of an Iraqi civilian. The next day, two soldiers were charged with murder, and their CO relieved of his duty (but not charged), in connection with a killing in Kirkuk last month. How common is the killing of Iraqi civilians by American soldiers? McClatchy Newspapers reports that the US has shot 429 Iraqi civilians at checkpoints in the last year. Those are the first such stats for checkpoint shootings. US officials say that number is actually declining, and they're probably right: the GAO says we've shelled out $31 million in condolence payments to families of victims since 2003. Since the maximum payment is $2,500 (Iraqi life is cheap), do the math: at least 12,400 innocent Iraqi civilians have been mistakenly shot and killed (i.e., murdered) at checkpoints alone. Not all victims are identified or compensated for, and they don't all get the maximum $2,500, so the real number is probably quite a bit higher.

A chilling article this month in The Nation puts such deaths in context by interviewing 50 returned US vets about the violence they inflicted against Iraqi civilians. The nauseating but essential picture painted is that such violence is brutal, random, and commonplace. And so, we end with a Pentagon report last week that concludes the US military needs to revise its tarnished brand in Iraq. "[We want] something we can learn from Madison Avenue or from the marketers, the best in the world, that might help us when we're trying to deliver a message about what democracy is," says Duane Schattle of US Joint Forces Command, which ordered the report. Apparently the whole "Democracy is: invading a country under false pretenses, killing and torturing its people, stealing its oil, and destroying everything we touch" thing isn't quite panning out, so we need...a new way to sell the same old behavior. It's all about marketing; pay no attention, Iraqis, to the illegal, immoral war that is destroying your country. How very American.