David Sanger and Thom Shanker, two fairly sensible Timesmen, have a strange report this morning.

WASHINGTON, June 23 — Last month, Congress set a deadline for the American commander in Iraq, declaring that by Sept. 15 he would have to assess progress there before billions more dollars are approved to finance the military effort to stabilize the country. The commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, said in recent days that his report would be only a snapshot of trends, strongly suggesting he will be asking for more time.

Well, we already knew this. In fact, any of a legion of liberal, progressive, or realistic cynics could write that report today and get graded with an A or B- based upon average guesswork.

But even before he composes the first sentences of the report, to be written with the new American ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan C. Crocker, the administration is commissioning other assessments that could dilute its findings about the impact of the current troop increase. The intent appears to be to give President Bush, who publicly puts great emphasis on listening to his field commanders, a wide range of options.

The assessments are likely to conclude that the Iraqi government has failed to use the troop increase for the purpose the president intended, to strike the political accommodations that he said would stabilize the country. That and other views expected in the various reports could also provide some rationale for beginning a reduction of troops in Iraq under conditions far short of the “victory” Mr. Bush, for the past four years, has said was his ultimate goal. He has used that word with far less frequency recently.

It’s unclear to me why Messers Sanger and Shanker would stupidly suggest Mr Bu$h needs a wide range of options. He has no intention of lowering either the number of troops in country, nor the level of violence. Like the fabled monkeys, a million experts could write a million assessments for a million years. It will make no difference. There is only one assessment that will matter.

Shortly before GEN Petraeus’ September 15th reporting date renowned military strategist and Napoleonic War expert Fred Kagan will produce his own assessment, quite likely in either the warmongering Weekly Standard on under the auspices of the warmongering American Enterprise Institute, in which he will declare that the surge escalation has had a good start, but the job isn’t finished yet, and we must keep after al Qaeda (unless that propaganda theme has been replaced with some other bogeyman by then) and GEN Petraeus needs another 30,000 troops to finish the job.

What we laughingly refer to as our military leaders will shake their heads in astonishment. There will be proclamations that there are no other 30,000 to send to Iraq. There will be a quiet meeting in which Mr Bu$h asks our leaders how they like having people snap to attention and salute them when they enter a room or walk by. Well, no. He won’t use those words. He hasn’t the acumen for that. But he will explain to them that he is the Decider-in-Chief, the Commander Guy, and they had damned well better find him the 30,000 that Mr Kagan demands.

The “15 months in, 12 months out” policy will join other discarded enlightened Army policies. Marines will start doing 12 month tours, rather than 7 months in country.

The troops will sit still for this treatment. They are patriotic, loyal, and well-motivated. They believe in what they think our nation is doing over there. Whether they are fully aware of things we know here is uncertain, since Fox Noise is the official news carrier in the Middle East and there is very little opportunity for them to gather news from free and independent news sources like many of the UK papers.

American intelligence agencies, according to senior administration and intelligence officials, are already preparing to submit their own assessment of Iraq’s progress. That is expected to include a judgment about whether Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is willing or capable of striking the kind of Shiite-Sunni political balance Mr. Bush said was the ultimate objective of the American strategy, and whether the passage of political compromises, none of which have yet cleared Parliament, have any hope of reducing the violence. That report will begin circulating, officials said, around the time that General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker arrive in Washington to testify about what the troop increase has accomplished.

Please. It appears Messers Sanger and Shanker have forgotten that the official US policy is that the American intelligence organs, personified by the CIA, are incompetent, which is why we have intelligence shaping shops in the Office of the Vice President. The professional intelligence reported that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs while Ahmad Chalabi and Dick “dick” Cheney had already decided he did. The CIA, by virtue of its having been proved right, is incapable of accurate forecasting in anything more complex than the weather. Just ask any of the 26%. They’ll tell you the CIA got it wrong, because they went against Mr Bu$h’s famous Gut of Infallibiity.

One more data point:

The reality [of troops levels], officials said, is that starting around April the military will simply run out of troops to maintain the current effort. By then, officials said, Mr. Bush would either have to withdraw roughly one brigade a month, or extend the tours of troops now in Iraq and shorten their time back home before redeployment.

The latter, said one White House official, “is not something the president wants to do” and would likely become a centerpiece of the 2008 presidential campaign. [emph added]

The realities of the 2008 campaign matter far less to Mr Bu$h than the appearance that he was wrong about something. The troops levels will be raised and will be sustained. You read it first in the NYTimes and second, here.