NYT - Bush to Declare Gains in Iraq on Some Fronts

July 12, 2007

By DAVID S. CLOUD and JOHN F. BURNS

WASHINGTON, July 11 — The Bush administration will assert in the next few days that progress in carrying out the new American strategy in Iraq has been satisfactory on nearly half of the 18 benchmarks set by Congress, according to several administration officials.

But it will qualify some verdicts by saying that even when the political performance of the Iraqi government has been unsatisfactory, it is too early to make final judgments, the officials said.

The administration’s decision to qualify many of the political benchmarks will enable it to present a more optimistic assessment than if it had provided the pass-fail judgment sought by Congress when it approved funding for the war this spring.

The administration officials who provided details of the draft report to The New York Times, insisting on anonymity, did so partly to rebut claims by members of Congress in recent days that almost no progress had been made in Iraq since President Bush altered course by ordering the deployment of about 30,000 additional troops earlier this year.

The report will land in the middle of a two-week Senate debate that has pitted advocates of an early American troop withdrawal against Mr. Bush, who wants to defer major policy decisions on Iraq until September, when a more comprehensive report is due from the top two Americans in Iraq, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and Gen. David H. Petraeus.

The White House report says the most progress has been achieved in the military realm. The American command’s latest unpublished monthly figures, prepared for the White House report, show a substantial decline in two major categories of violence, the number of Iraqi civilians killed in sectarian violence and casualties from car and truck bomb explosions.

But the report also acknowledges that some military benchmarks have not been met, including improvements in the ability and political neutrality of the Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi government. Even in some areas where the report will cite progress, the officials in Washington said the document would acknowledge that the overall goal of political reconciliation remained elusive and would chide the Iraqis for failing to take advantage of the presence of more American troops to take more far-reaching steps.

Administration officials said the report could be made public as early as Thursday, though the White House said the timing of the release had not been determined. At the same time, officials said, the White House would like to avoid giving Congress ammunition to use in seeking to enact restrictions on the United States military presence in Iraq.

The report will “not conclude, as it has been characterized, that this is a colossal failure,” one of the officials said. “It is a mixed bag, with some areas that are too early to pass judgment on.”

Several administration officials said that in the drafting of the report, which was done primarily at the National Security Council, officials tried to walk a fine line between giving a credible assessment of Iraq’s progress and giving the Iraqis an incentive, in the words of one official, “to improve their grades.”

Administration officials said the Pentagon had been much more willing than the State Department and the White House to make hard and fast calls about whether Iraqi progress was satisfactory.

An assessment of political progress provided to the House Armed Services Committee by Thomas Fingar, the deputy director for analysis at the National Intelligence Council, painted a much bleaker picture than the White House report, saying there were “few appreciable gains.”

The new military figures come from a sheaf of colored charts and graphs prepared by the American military command for submission to the White House. The documents say that sectarian killings in Baghdad declined to 300 in June, when the American force reached full strength, from 1,650 in January. Nationally, sectarian killings declined to 650 in June from 2,100 in January, according to the documents. The number of “high profile” bombings, including suicide attacks, fell below 90 in June from more than 180 in March.

In separate interviews in recent days, Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, have offered a subdued view of the military statistics, saying that while some measures of violence showed a downward trend, it was too early to suggest that there had been a lasting turnaround in the war.

Ambassador Crocker, in an interview on Saturday, was blunt in his assessment of the war. While “by Iraqi standards, June was a pretty good month,” he said, the figure of 650 sectarian killings showed that the situation remained grim. “If 20 people killed a day is good news, that tells you how bad things were previously,” he said. “The challenges here at every level remain just huge.”

But he said he believed that the United States could avoid disaster in Iraq, given enough time. “Do I think it can still be done?” he said. “Yes, I do. I’m just not sure if it can be done on the kind of time lines and with the kind of time pressures that the situation back home has generated.”

Other figures relayed in the report to Washington showed that Iraqi casualties from car and truck bombs, which have been the war’s biggest cause of injury and death, fell below 500 in June, including more than 200 casualties from one attack on a Shiite mosque in the Rusafa area of east Baghdad, compared with 1,100 in February. According to a detailed breakdown, vehicle bombings across Iraq fell to 40 in June, compared with 115 in March; suicide bombings fell to 30 from 48; and attacks by suicide vest bombers stayed nearly equal, with 18 in June, 2 fewer than in March.

Another measure of the Baghdad violence, the number of insurgent and militia attacks, went from 200 in a two-week period just before the troop increase began in mid-February to 390 in the first two weeks of June, before falling back to 240 in the second half of the month, according to the American figures.

A senior officer who helped compile the charts said the spike reflected the heightened tempo of American-led military operations in insurgent and militia strongholds across the city. “The attacks are up because we’re going into the neighborhoods picking fights,” he said.

General Petraeus was cautious in assessing the fall-off in what the military calls “high-profile attacks,” meaning bombings with parked vehicles that cause high casualties, and suicide attacks with bomb-laden vehicles or by militants wearing suicide vests. He noted that in early July there were a number of devastating attacks, including a suicide bombing in a village southwest of Kirkuk last week that killed more than 130 people.

“That had gone down for three months in a row, April, May and June, fairly substantially,” the general said. But he added, “We will have to see if that is sustained this month or not, because there have been a number, as you know, at the beginning of this month.”

The most striking success shown by the military figures was in the western desert province of Anbar, an area declared all but lost politically to insurgents by a Marine intelligence report in 2006. The number of attacks in Anbar declined to 225 in June from 1,300 in October, according to the military data.

American officers have attributed the success in Anbar to deals with Sunni tribal leaders exhausted with the brutalities of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely Iraqi organization that American officers assert has foreign leadership. But the military says that the extremists, under pressure in Anbar, have moved the focus of their attacks elsewhere, including the troubled province of Diyala north of Baghdad, and the oil-rich city of Mosul in the north.

On the political front, none of the benchmarks that have been achieved include the high-profile legislation on which Congress asked to see progress. Debate has not yet begun in the Iraqi Parliament on the oil law or the revenue-sharing law, both of which are crucial to keeping Iraq united over the long term.

The most direct criticism of the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki in the report, officials said, is for its failure to make headway on a law that would make it easier for former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party to obtain government jobs. American officials consider the measure vital to any political reconciliation with Sunnis. Laws to disarm militias and to grant amnesty are still in their formative stages, and as a practical matter, disarming militias seems an all but impossible goal as more groups control swaths of territory.

In the report, Mr. Maliki’s government will be credited with taking steps toward forming a committee to review and overhaul the Iraqi Constitution and with making progress on “allocating and spending” its $10 billion budget for reconstruction projects, though officials privately say little of the money has been spent so far on projects.

In contrast to the White House report, Mr. Fingar’s assessment to the House committee was overtly critical. “The multiparty government of Nuri al-Maliki continues halting efforts to bridge the divisions and restore commitment to a unified country,” it concluded, “and it has made limited progress on key legislation.” But it added that “communal violence and scant common ground between Shias, Sunnis and Kurds continues to polarize politics,” and Mr. Maliki’s effort at reconciliation are “only at its initial stages.”

Mr. Crocker said in an interview that he did not expect the legislative benchmarks to be achieved in the coming weeks and that in his view those measures were less significant than whether the leaders of the different factions found a way to keep talking to one another. He said he had been encouraged by signs in recent weeks that a small group of leaders representing each of the major sectarian and ethnic blocs — including Mr. Maliki, a Shiite; President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd; and Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni — had met at times of crisis and spoken with a common voice.

General Petraeus appeared eager to send a message to lawmakers on Capitol Hill who have grown impatient with the war. “I can understand why the folks at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue could be frustrated, angry, disappointed and upset over the situation in Iraq,” he said, adding: “I share the same emotions, and I’m the one going to the memorial services. I went to a ceremony last night for five soldiers, and the night before for four.”

David S. Cloud reported from Washington, and John F. Burns from Baghdad. Michael R. Gordon and Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Baghdad, and David E. Sanger from Washington.