State Department Disagrees With Michael O'Hanlon, White House, Pentagon About GAO Iraq Report
August 31, 2007 -- 3:55 PM EST // //
It'll be interesting to see if this gets any attention.
Right now pro and anti-war forces are battling over the new nonpartisan Government Accountability Office report that leaked yesterday which says that the Iraqi government is falling short of virtually all the benchmarks that have been set for it. Because this new GAO report will be an effective weapon to use against the positive assessment that General Petraeus is likely to deliver next month to Congress, the pro-war forces are eager to discredit it.
The White House is claiming that the report is overly negative. The Pentagon wants the GAO to revise it to reflect a more positive assessment. And pro-war Brookings Institution figure Michael O'Hanlon sharply criticized the report today, saying that he hopes it will be "improved" to provide a rosier view of the war.
It turns out, however, that a rather significant player disagrees with O'Hanlon, the White House, and the Pentagon about the GAO report: The State Department.
Check out this little nugget buried in an article in today's Washington Post on the GAO report:
The draft has circulated within the State and Defense departments for comment before its publication.So officials at the State Department read a draft of the report and didn't dispute its "basic conclusions" -- unlike the White House and O'Hanlon.Although the State Department proposed some changes, it did not dispute the basic conclusions, said an administration official involved in Iraq policy. The Pentagon, however, "made some factual corrections" and "offered some suggestions on a few of the actual grades," Morrell said.
Because this was sourced to an anonymous administration official, I put in a call to State to verify the story. A spokesperson for the State Department declined to comment -- which probably means that we can assume for the time being that this is true.
I'm really not sure how to assess the significance of this, but it certainly seems noteworthy. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, one of the two key officials delivering his assessment of Iraq in September, is part of the State Department. And apparently the professionals at State, which has a key role in overseeing and assessing the political process in Iraq, agree with the GAO report's extremely dire view of the political failures of the Iraqi government. And State disagrees with the White House, O'Hanlon, and the Pentagon, who are refusing to see these failures for what they are.
Will Crocker's assessment reflect what others at State think? Will such State views be made public? With the battle for public opinion set to reach a white hot temperature next week, this little tidbit seems at the very least to be worthy of further inquiry.
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