You know that when you determine a result on a faulty premise you get a faulty result. I commented on the GAO report last week which was drawn up by congressional democrats with an impossible set a standards. If you you told me that in order to be a pianist I would have to suck it through my nose, then I would never make the grade.

Fred Kagan at The Weekly Standard writes:

“The GAO report reflects everything that has been wrong with the discussion about Iraq since the end of 2006. Through no fault of the GAO’s, the organization was sent on a fool’s errand by Congress. Its mandate was not to evaluate progress in Iraq, but to determine whether or not the Iraqi government had met the 18 benchmarks. As a result, as the report repeatedly notes, the GAO was forced to fit an extraordinarily complicated reality into a black-and-white, yes-or-no simplicity. In addition, the GAO’s remit extended only to evaluating progress on the Congressionally-sanctioned 18 benchmarks, 14 of which were established between eight and 11 months ago in a very different context. As a result, the report ignores completely a number of crucial positive developments that were not foreseen when the benchmarks were established and that, in fact, offer the prospect of a way forward that is much more likely to succeed than the year-old, top-down concept the GAO was told to measure. As the situation in Iraq has been changing dynamically over the past eight months, as American strategy and operations, both military and political, have been adjusting on the ground to new realities, the debate in Washington has remained mired in the preconceptions and approaches of 2006. The GAO report epitomizes this fact.”

Of course there was no reason to commission such a report except that the fact that democrats in congress know that General Patreaus is going to show positive results. As I’ve said before they are pulling out all the stops with all these so-called progress reports and “assessments” so as to set up Patraeus and Crocker up for another embarrassing and demeaning grilling before the cut and runners like Reid, Levin, and the rest.

In spite of their efforts however the only report that matters is that of Patraeus and Crocker and – lest we forget – the President is still the Commander and Chief and is still running the armed forces. Top this that according to several reports his commanders on the ground are telling him to stand his ground.

Kaplan agrees:

“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.”