The Independent(U.K)

Leading article: Mr Bush pays the price for this fatally ill-judged war
Published: 13 July 2007
White House spin-doctors did their utmost to put a positive gloss on it, and President Bush added his own two-penn'orth worth in an unusual morning press conference. But there was little any of them could do to relieve the pervasive sense of gloom. The security situation in Iraq clearly remains extremely bleak - and threatens to become bleaker still. In the words of the report released yesterday, the situation is "complex and extremely challenging" - diplomatic language for as bad as it gets.

This was an interim report, compiled by the White House after consultation with the commander on the ground, General David Patraeus, and the US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker. The final version, which is required by the US Congress in mid-September, will be the make-or-break document. As President Bush stressed yesterday, it will be crucial in determining what Washington does next.

Yet the release of the interim report had a significance of its own. That these provisional conclusions saw the light of day at all is testimony to the pressure Mr Bush now finds himself under, not only from the Democrat-controlled Congress, but from American public opinion. Opinion polls show Mr Bush to be as unpopular as Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal, and seven out of 10 Americans surveyed this week favoured a US withdrawal from Iraq by next April. The conjunction of these two forces could speed Mr Bush towards withdrawal, whether he would choose it or not.

Under the US Constitution, of course, a US President cannot be forced from office other than by impeachment. He can, however, be rendered effectively impotent, if Congress withholds money and his party forsakes him. This is the humiliation confronting Mr Bush a full 18 months before he is due to leave office.

At his press conference yesterday, Mr Bush said that on the 18 benchmarks set by Congress, Iraq had been graded "satisfactory" on eight, "unsatisfactory" on eight, and "mixed" on the remaining two. In theory, that made the score neutral. The trouble is that in practical terms the failures vastly outweigh the successes. The successes - stumping up the requisite cash for training Iraqi troops and police, for instance - tick the boxes, but mean little if those troops and police are unable to combat the insurgency. The failures - no progress on local elections and no law on dividing up oil revenue - remain just that, failures.

Mr Bush offered two points in mitigation. First, he said, it was only last month that the final contingent of US troop reinforcements had arrived to complete the so-called "surge", so it was too early to write that effort off. And second, the failures were by and large on the political side, while the successes were concentrated on the security side. Progress in security, he argued, was a precondition for political progress, therefore the indicators could be described as positive.

These arguments are at very least questionable. There was a time, after all, when political advances - national elections and the rest - were lauded as a necessary prelude to improved security. The "surge", meanwhile, has had less impact on the violence than had been hoped, while upping the US casualty rate to a level that is passing the limits of the American public's tolerance. All that Mr Bush could realistically offer yesterday, citing the report, was that things were likely to get worse before they got better, with the likelihood of an increase in al-Qa'ida-inspired attacks through the summer.