Both sides get ready to spin Gen. Petraeus’s Iraq report

Gen. David Petraeus’s report on the state of President Bush’s troop surge in Iraq won’t come out for another month, but with so much riding on its findings, lawmakers on both sides are already spinning its meaning.

Lawmakers are trying to anticipate what the top U.S. commander in Iraq will say in the report, gaming out how the other side will spin it, and then trying to figure out how to react to the spin.

{mosads}Led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Democrats say they fear that Bush’s handpicked commander in Iraq will paint an unreasonably rosy picture of the progress on the ground.

“I’m very concerned that they will kick the can further down the road or talk about a few anecdotal successes that they’ll try to pass off as the situation in Iraq,” Pelosi told a group of journalists recently.

Republicans say that the Democrats are unwilling to accept the good news that’s coming in about Bush’s initiative. U.S. commanders are already touting that large, al Qaeda-style attacks have dropped 50 percent since the troop increase started six months ago.

“Liberal Democrats are going to approach this with closed minds and open mouths,” said Brian Kennedy, spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio).

The political stakes are high, especially for Republicans and President Bush. Centrists who have stuck with Bush on the increasingly unpopular war have pointed to September and Petraeus’s report as the point at which they will re-evaluate their support for the war.

As the debate raged on Iraq through the year, many key decisions were put off. Now, those bills are coming due for Congress.
In September, lawmakers will vote on an Iraq supplemental spending bill, along with the annual defense-spending measure, a proposal by war opponents calling for swift withdrawal, and possible votes and conference reports on readiness and “no permanent bases” legislation.

Since May, the Sept. 15 deadline for the report has become increasingly critical as a decisive denouement in the debate about Iraq and President Bush’s troop increase.

The report was ordered in the war supplemental spending bill passed that month, after Bush vetoed a previous Iraq bill calling for withdrawal and Democrats couldn’t muster the votes to override him.

The legislation also required a preliminary assessment in July, which created its own furious round of spinning.

Initial reports based on unnamed sources stated that none of the benchmarks had been met. The administration launched an information counteroffensive that maintained some of the benchmarks had been met, while others had not.
Administration officials cast it as a measurement to set baseline data, not a reason to change policy.

The benchmarks to be evaluated in the report include de-Baathification, distribution of oil revenue, disarming militias, reducing sectarian violence and increasing the capability of Iraq Security Forces.

Other recent cases have made it even clearer that September is going to be an increasingly important month in the war debate. In July, as Senate Democrats rolled out an all-night session to debate Iraq and House Democrats promised a vote a week on the war, Republicans beat back calls to abandon the president by saying that the results shouldn’t be judged until the summer is over.

At the same time, Democrats started to worry about the consequences of staking so much on one report, particularly one controlled by the administration. House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told The Washington Post in July that a positive Petraeus report would be “a real big problem for us.”

Republicans, he noted, aren’t the only ones waiting on Petraeus. He noted that the commander has significant credibility among the 47 members of his party’s conservative Blue Dog Coalition.

Democrats and anti-war activists are anticipating that Petraeus will assert that the surge has been a military success while conceding that the Iraqis have not accomplished political reconciliation. That possibility has caused some to worry that the administration will push for more time to let the surge create more political reconciliation.

But Democrats are already preparing a counter-argument: The surge was supposed to create the space for political reconciliation, but failed to do so. Accordingly, Bush should not be given a second chance.

“If there is no political change, there is no way that we should have our troops stay there,” Pelosi said.