Our analysis of the 18 legislative, security and economic benchmarks shows that as of August 30, 2007, the Iraqi government met 3, partially met 4, and did not meet 11 of its 18 benchmarks.
The chart on page two of the GAO summary is handy.
Please remember the obvious in all this: The surge is designed to last into early next year. The various September reports were designed to provide tools to assess whether the surge is working--not whether it worked. This is one of the reasons I worried last winter about a surge. I worried that we wouldn't have a metric to judge the surge. The GAO report reflects this perfectly. Unable to judge by hard criteria whether the surge is working, the GAO report tries to measure whether we've succeeded in the surge. And worse, critics of the war are using the report to judge whether we've won the whole war.
We are still early in the surge, so an assessment that judges the campaign based on whether it has achieved 2008 objectives in August 2007 is fairly meaningless.
Not that the assessment is without merit in proper perspective. As a tool to making sure we get progress by spring 2008, it is a good job. For people intent on winning, it tells us where we need to improve.
But since the leaders of Congress are eager to surrender now, the report will be used to further that goal.
UPDATE: Frederick Kagan isn't as generous as I am about the report and how it defined success or failure even within the narrow bounds it was given, though we share views on how it will be used:
One could go on cataloguing the failings of the GAO report, both in its mandate and in its execution, but the exercise would quickly become tedious. The GAO was given a fool's errand by a Congress determined to generate at least one report this September that it could reliably cite showing failure in Iraq. Well, Congress accomplished its goal. For those of us who are interested in what is really happening in Iraq, the reports of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker will be far more useful.
Still, adding a third "partial" category was a major rejection of the up-or-down standard they were given by Congress.
