The big lie

The Bush administration's top two officials in Iraq answered questions from Congress for more than six hours on Monday, but their testimony may have been as important for what they didn't say as for what they did.

According to a McClatchy report this morning, Petraeus and Crocker are playing out what amounts to a shell game.

Neither Petraeus nor U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker talked about the fact that since the troop surge began the pace by which Iraqis were abandoning their homes in search of safety had increased. They didn't mention that 86 percent of Iraqis who've fled their homes said they'd been targeted because of their sect, according to the International Organization for Migration.

While Petraeus stressed that civilian casualties were down over the last five weeks, he drew no connection between that statement and a chart he displayed that showed that the number of attacks rose during at least one of those weeks.

Petraeus also didn't highlight the fact that his charts showed that "ethno-sectarian" deaths in August, down from July, were still higher than in June, and he didn't explain why the greatest drop in such deaths, which peaked in December, occurred between January and February, before the surge began.

And while both officials said that the Iraqi security forces were improving, neither talked about how those forces had been infiltrated by militias, though Petraeus acknowledged that during 2006 some Iraqi security forces had participated in the ethnic violence.

These criticisms of the Bush administration's presentation don't come from an op-ed piece but from McClatchy's Baghdad correspondent and its Washington bureau.  They are no more enthusiastic about committee members who, by and large, gave Petraeus and Crocker a pass.

Questions from the 107 members of Congress who sat in on the hearing rarely produced more detail.

There is one article which sums up what we are doing to ourselves and to Iraq, but reading it takes a very strong stomach.