September: a bevy of stage-manged fluff that still says Iraq is a failure

Emptywheel takes a look at the series of reports on Iraq dues out in September, and the conclusion is that many people involved in writing the reports are leaking them to avoid having the Bush administration water down how bad the situation there really is.

What's really bad is that, even watered down, the Bush administration is failing in Iraq. Here is what we can expect:

• The Petreaus Report (written by the White House since they don't trust Gen. Petreaus to lie for them.)
• The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq.
• A report requested by Congress from an independent commission headed by retired Marine Corps Gen. Jim Jones.
• A GAO report, also requested by Congress. A 69 page draft of this report was leaked to the Washington Post because people involved with it feared that the results were so negative that the White House would water it down before it was released.
  

The Bushies keep lowering the bar about what success in Iraq is, and even after a dozen or more bar-lowerings, they still cannot meet the extremely low levels of success they attempt to define for themselves. That in itself should be recognized as an admission that the battle for the Occupation of Iraq has been lost long ago.

September is not going to be a kind month for the Bush administration.