Bush's optimism is impossible to square with the situation in Iraq

Bush's optimism is impossible to square with the situation in Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn in Arbil
Published: 13 July 2007

Scrambling to shore up crumbling support for the war in Iraq, President George Bush released a report yesterday claiming sufficient political and military progress to justify the presence of 170,000 US troops in the country.

President Bush said he still believed victory in Iraq was possible.

"Those who believe that the battle in Iraq is lost will likely point to the unsatisfactory performance on some of the political benchmarks," he said.

"Those who believe the battle in Iraq can and must be won see the satisfactory performance on several of the security benchmarks as a cause of optimism." He added it was too early to say if his new strategy in Iraq was working.

But in Iraq as in the US there is a sense that Washington is playing its last cards. "I assume the US is going to start pulling out because 70 per cent of Americans and Congress want the troops to come home," Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Iraqi politician, said. "The Americans are defeated. They haven't achieved any of their aims."

The report itself admits to a sense in Iraq that the US, one way or another, is on the way out more than four years after its invasion in 2003.

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The picture it hopes to give - and this has been uncritically reported by the US media - is of a mixture of progress and frustration in Iraq.

The wholly misleading suggestion is that the war could go either way. In reality the six failures are on issues critical to the survival of Iraq while the eight successes are on largely trivial matters.