Pushback

The AP reports that the Pentagon is blue-penciling the GAO findings.

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said that after reviewing a draft of the Government Accountability Office report _ which has not yet been made public _ policy officials "made some factual corrections" and "offered some suggestions on a few of the actual grades" assigned by the GAO.

The Associated Press has learned that the GAO report will conclude that at least 13 of the 18 benchmarks set to judge the Iraqi government's performance in the political and security arenas haven't been met.

What a surprise.

And what a strange, through-the-looking-glass world we've been press-ganged into courtesy of these Bushian yahoos: does anyone have any doubt that Bushco will present anything but the rosiest of scenarios?

There was a bit of drama surrounding the Iraq Study Group. But then Bush unceremoniously crumpled it up and threw it over his shoulder. Shouldn't the very notion of suspense have died that day? Is there a person anywhere over the age of five that believes there is even the minutest question about what Petraeus will say when Dick Cheney tugs at the strings attached to his wooden jaw?

So why are we all playing along with this ridiculous charade of waiting as though any minute now Santa Claus will descend from the chimney? There's a lot of industrious pre-debunking - a fine endeavor for the GAO. But for the rest of us plebes, a fusillade of ridicule was and is required.

Anyway. What's even funnier is the Bush Administration's whining that the standards imposed by the Democratic Congress - that metrics be employed! reports made! - make it all just too damn hard.

"A bar was set so high, that it was almost not to be able to be met," White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino said.

It's hard work!

In another dispatch from Planet Reality, the Boston Globe reports that all this "Surge" business will necessarily be short-lived anyway:

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon cannot sustain its current force levels in Iraq beyond next summer, effectively giving the Bush administration and the Iraqi government until the middle of 2008 to capitalize on recent security improvements before the US military must draw down its forces, according to US military officials and foreign policy analysts.

When the 15-month combat tours end for the nearly 30,000 additional US troops President Bush sent to Iraq earlier this year to secure the country, the Army will be unable to replace them without damaging morale or troop readiness, senior Army officials say. Those forces will complete their tours during the spring and summer of 2008, according to Army deployment schedules.

All well and good. I won't hold my breath for BushCo to agree to limit their plans to what is possible. Parameters are for suckers!

After all, this Administration took this country to war:

• without the extra two hundred thousand troops we needed, and
• without enough body armor and vehicles, and
• without securing legitimate buy-in by Americans, and
• without a plan for post-invasion Iraq, and
• without maintaining maintaining enlistment standards, and
• without honoring agreements with soldiers that their time of service might ever come to an end.

And all this because to attend to all of the above (save the lack of Phase IV planning) would mean we couldn't go to war with Iraq.

Can't begin a war because we aren't prepared? Too bad - do it anyway. I'm sure everything will work out just fine.

So while I'd love to believe that breaking our military is high on the list of concerns for Bush and Cheney, reality says otherwise.

However, I do apprecaite this:

Army Secretary Peter Geren, the service's top official, recently said he sees "no possibility" of extending the duty tours of US troops beyond 15 months.

Nice to see brass going on the record with a little pushback.