GAO disinformation

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The Government Accountability Office (GAO) "progress report" issued Tuesday on Iraq has served its purpose for critics of the war: to get a credible-sounding report that would discredit the war effort issued in advance of the September 15 report from Gen. David Petraeus on the progress of the "surge." Sen. John Kerry used the head of the GAO, Comptroller General David Walker, as a prop for a Senate Foreign Relations Committee dog-and-pony show aimed at driving home the point that failure in Iraq is inevitable, and to no one's surprise, Sen. Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the left-wing blogs piled on as well, and the mainstream media dutifully reported the GAO's findings in checklist form with little or no substantive analysis.

A central problem with the report is that it barely mentions the fact that Sunni Arabs in Anbar province have turned en masse against al Qaeda in Iraq and have been taking up arms against it — transforming one of the most dangerous places in Iraq into one of the safest. But the congressionally mandated benchmarks don't take account of this transformational change, making it difficult for the GAO to say very much about it. American Enterprise Institute scholar Frederick Kagan highlights myriad other flaws in the GAO report. For example, the GAO found that the goal of "Enacting and implementing legislation addressing amnesty" for former insurgents had not been met, and that militia disarmament has not been achieved. Technically, these things are true — if you confine your analysis to looking at a legislative fix courtesy of the Iraqi Council of Representatives. But these statements disregard what is actually happening on the ground — the fact that as many as 30,000 former insurgents have joined the Iraqi government and coalition forces in fighting al Qaeda and its terrorist allies. "Because of the presence of U.S. forces and agreements of the Iraqi government, insurgents and terrorists feel comfortable providing fingerprints, retina scans and the serial numbers of their weapons to our forces in order to fight our common enemies," Mr. Kagan writes in the Weekly Standard. "It's hard to imagine a better amnesty than that."

But the most bizarre thing about the GAO report is its assertion that there is no "clear and reliable evidence that the level of sectarian violence was reduced." How did the GAO reach this strange conclusion? "... because measuring such violence requires understanding the perpetrators's intent, which may not be known." But it is ridiculous to pretend that when a Sunni blows up a truck in a Shi'ite neighborhood market, or a Shi'ite militia kidnaps Sunni males and kills them with an electric drill, that it is not "sectarian" violence. Common sense tells us what it is, and military sources say that this kind of violence has plummeted to one-quarter or one-third of pre-surge levels. As "a statement of epistemology," Mr. Kagan notes, the GAO's formulation is "correct and worth meditating on. As a basis for denying that there has been a reduction in sectarian attacks, it is ludicrous."

It's important to keep this in mind when we hear Mr. Kerry and his ilk pontificate about how the GAO shows that we are "failing" in Iraq. The report seriously misleads regarding the successes being achieved on the ground — a point that should be abundantly clear to the Washington types parroting this disinformation.