WASHINGTON POST AND FOX NEWS DIFFER ON WHAT HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED IN IRAQ

FOX NEWS continues to tout the military success of "the surge" in Iraq, but the military success, although very fragile, has absolutely NOTHING to do with the overall goals of the Bush administration for Iraq according to the Washington Post.

Most of the benchmarks set down by the Bush administration in 2007 for Iraq have not been met according to a General Accounting Office report issued the other day.

However, FOX NEWS pulled out ONLY the military successes and conveniently overlooked the fact that the government in Iraq has accomplished little or nothing.

The Bush administration lacks an updated and comprehensive Iraq strategy to move beyond the "surge" of combat troops President Bush launched in January 2007 as an 18-month effort to curtail violence and build Iraqi democracy, government investigators said Monday.

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While agreeing with the administration that violence has decreased sharply, a report released Monday 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 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.

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on the ground and the pending withdrawal of the last of the additional U.S. forces mean that strategy is now outdated, the report said.

The GAO recommends that the State and Defense departments work together to fashion a new approach.

The GAO report contrasted with a Pentagon report, dated June 13 but not released until Monday. The Defense Department's quarterly assessment to Congress, "Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq," said that "security, political and economic trends in Iraq continue to be positive, although they remain fragile, reversible and uneven."

In many respects, the two reports seemed to assess wholly different realities. The 74-page Pentagon document emphasized what it called the "negative role" in Iraqi security that Iran and Syria have played. The 94-page GAO report did not mention Iran and referred to Syria only in the context of Iraqi refugees who had settled there.