In the wake of the disturbing news that the Iraqi government has not met any benchmarks set for it, including the only benchmark that really matters, an anonymous source (is there any other kind for our broken and corrupt corporate press?) has said that the Bu$h malAdministration is preparing a super-duper flag-waving rouser of a speech to pose as a presentation to Congress for its July 15th interim report on the state of the surge escalation.

WASHINGTON - A progress report on Iraq will conclude that the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reform, speeding up the Bush administration's reckoning on what to do next, a U.S. official said Monday.

One likely result of the report will be a vastly accelerated debate among President Bush's top aides on withdrawing troops and scaling back the U.S. presence in Iraq.

The "pivot point" for addressing the matter will no longer be Sept. 15, as initially envisioned, when a full report on Bush's so-called "surge" plan is due, but instead will come this week when the interim mid-July assessment is released, the official said.

What the criminals occupying our White House are really worried about is not the state of the escalation, but rather about domestic politics, which has been the only bellwether for these people since day one. The alleged “defection” of several prominent Republican Senators is an inconvenience and nothing more. If there were a vote tomorrow on leaving Iraq each of these Senators would stand 100% with Mr Bu$h. They dare do nothing else.

Senator Reid plans a number of steps over then next several weeks in attempts to get these allegedly disenchanted politicians to back up their words with actions.

Good luck, Senator Reid. Their “defection” is a public description crafted by reporters who are too stupid, lazy, or corrupt to properly interpret the nuances of political speech.

They are also being pressed by a lot of adverse reaction to the culminating public visibility of government by corrupt dictatorship: The Attorneygate scandal is far from over; the Scooter Libby commutation will be examined in more detail; the undue and extra-constitutional wiretapping is up for more public scrutiny; and the malign influence of Dick “dick” Cheney is still being looked at. All of these and other scandals are being delicately viewed in the daylight of the mainstream media.

Mr Bu$h’s report will acknowledge some difficulties, including a spiraling cost, now running to $12 Billion a month, for which we are getting something around 100 dead GIs a month, brutally dismembered and disfigured military casualties swamping a medical care system not up to the challenge and a veterans care administration that doesn’t even make a pretense of caring about them. We are also getting increased and more horrendous civilian casualties, and face the specter of Turkey, one of our best military allies in the Middle East, poised to enter Iraq in order to deal with their Kurdish problem.

The report will note that the Iraq government has not met any of its established benchmarks but will not mention why. The civil war we created when we overturned Iraq’s national government was not replaced with an immediate stabilizing occupation government. And of course the reason why there was no planning for one can be traced right back to the lies of the neocon Zionists of the PNAC who urged Mr Bu$h to take on Saddam, whispering in his ear, “Go ahead. He tried to kill your Daddy, and anyway, your Daddy wasn’t man enough to do it when he had the chance. We'll be greeted with flowers and candies."

The careerists among the military will assure Mr Bu$h that we can make this work – that three months just hasn’t been long enough - because they are incapable of admitting their own errors.

The report will project a strong note of confidence, wrapped up with some heavily massaged statistics that everyone in Congress will be too gentlemanly to study, and the pundits will immediately seize upon as “proof” that this time, unlike all the other times, this time it really will work. The only ones who will study the statistics and call “bullshit” are the DFHs, who are notoriously crude and uncivil.

Actually the report has already been written. Fred Kagan, the noted military strategist and Napoleonic War expert participated in a discussion about his stunted and deformed child.

The worst that can be said of [the escalation] at this point is that the results have been mixed. I frankly think the results are less mixed…We can argue about statistics, but at the end of the day, that argument is not going to get us anywhere right now. … Whatever you can say about the current strategy, it has not failed.

Mixed results. We’ve topped 3,600 dead Americans in this folly. Something close to 1,000,000 million Iraqis have died. We’re broke. We’re financing this monstrosity on the backs of our grandchildren, financing if with mortgages from Japan and China.

But to Mr Kagan, an ironbound Straussian fascist, the only thing needed to win this war is will.

The other expert who got us into this swamp is Bill Kristol, the Likudnik operative whose cover is editor of The Weekly Standard. He also believes all we need is more willpower:

The best strategy for the president is to hold firm. There is every reason to believe that he can survive the current calamity-Janes of the Republican party (does anyone really imagine that a veto-proof majority will form in the Senate this week or next?). This nonsense will pass, Congress will go on recess, and Petraeus will have a chance to continue to produce results--and the president and his allies will have a chance to gain political ground here at home. Why on earth pull the plug now? Why give in to an insane, irrational panic that will destroy the Bush administration and most likely sweep the Republican party to ruin? The president still has a chance to emerge from this as a visionary who could see what the left could not--but not if he gives in to them. There is no safety in the position some in the Bush administration are running towards.

These two reports are the only advice Mr Bu$h will pay any attention to because it is advice he wants to hear. After six years of Mr Bu$h giving America the finger at every opportunity we should expect nothing less.

“The president still has a chance to emerge from this as a visionary who could see what the left could not--but not if he gives in to them.”

Every time one of these Straussian fascist fanatics open his mouth he reminds me of a man who, 70 years ago said, “It is our will that this state shall endure for a thousand years.” History has shown that willpower alone is not enough to win wars, move mountains, create national destinies, nor salvage legacies.

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