53064309_fc1bf87031_m.jpgMcSame, crowing about how awesome Iraq is last week:

"There is no doubt…in my mind that the surge is working."

The GAO says — no it’s not:

While agreeing with the administration that violence [in Iraq] has decreased sharply, a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office concluded that many other goals Bush outlined a year and a half ago in the "New Way Forward" strategy remain unmet.

The report, after a bleak GAO assessment last summer, cited little improvement in the ability of the Iraqi security forces to act independently of the U.S. military, and noted that key legislation passed by the Iraqi parliament had not been implemented while other crucial laws had not been passed. The report also judged that key Iraqi ministries spent less of their allocated budgets last year than in previous years, and said that oil and electricity production had repeatedly not met U.S. targets.

Republicans love to preen themselves in their moral clarity — how the world is black and white, right and wrong. But mention Iraq and they start desperately scrambling around for shades of gray.

It’s pretty simple. The surge, as defined by Bush in January 2007, has either succeeded or failed. And it’s clear it’s failed.

Bush’s strategy of January 2007, the GAO said, "defined the original goals and objectives that the Administration believed were achievable by the end of this phase in July 2008." Not meeting many of them changed circumstances on the ground and the pending withdrawal of the last of the additional U.S. forces mean that strategy is now outdated, the report said.

But McSame and the wingnut chorus will continue to insist that we’re "winning" and that we just need to stay the course — while totaly ignoring the metrics they set for what defines "winning" in the first place.

It’s quite a scam.