GAO: Iraq broken

The Washington Post got their hands on a damning GAO report about Iraq. The report isn't available to the public now, though, because it's still in draft form. The Post got it because a GAO source leaked it to them, fearing that the administration would gut the report of its damning conclusions before its official release. That's how reliably obfuscatory our executive branch has become. One key portion of the article:

While it makes no policy recommendations, the draft suggests that future administration assessments "would be more useful" if they backed up their judgments with more details and "provided data on broader measures of violence from all relevant U.S. agencies."

Right. The point of the surge, you'll recall, was to actually reduce violence in Iraq enough to allow the government to begin working functionally. As crazy as the idea obviously was, that was the effect it intended to have. What's happened instead is that the strategy didn't work at all (a fact the American public very obviously has a right to know) and no amount of hiding the information helped made the strategy any less of a failure.

This, if anything, gives the lie to the idea that the lack of broad support and national will power ruined what could have been a glorious victory for America in the Middle East. The surge happened. The Congress largely acceded. By lying and dissembling, the administration prevented most people from learning that the plan wasn't working. And yet, despite deploying every last resource at their behest, the whole thing failed. Will power wasn't the missing ingredient here. It was a recipe for disaster to begin with.