Editorial: The situation in Iraq is truly quite bleak

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Good deeds by U.S. troops can't erase the larger policy failure.

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In the first comprehensive SIGIR report, the Iraq reconstruction effort did not get even close to passing grades. The draft report was leaked to the New York Times. The SIGIR response was that the final report would be different. If it is, everyone will know that it has become simply another item of evidence in the Bush administration's pervasive record of scrubbing reports of anything critical of the administration.

Don't be fooled: John Hamre was part of a panel assembled to evaluate the draft report. Hamre is president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a well-respected and slightly right-leaning Washington think tank. "It's gutsy and it's honest," Hamre said of the draft report. It reveals that the U.S. reconstruction program "didn't go particularly well."

That is quite an understatement. The report lays out evidence of the failure to plan for postinvasion Iraq, lack of adequate staff on the ground to oversee reconstruction, horrible bureaucratic infighting between the Pentagon and the State Department (the State Department gets our vote for being almost always right), and hundreds of millions of dollars gone missing. The fact is, the Bush administration -- mostly in the guise of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon -- almost totally botched its ballyhooed reconstruction program. Yes, the insurgency had quite a lot to do with that, but the administration failed to anticipate the insurrection and plan how to prevent it from developing.

The good that individual soldiers and units do in Iraq is praiseworthy and demonstrates the basic decency of American military personnel. But they cannot make up for a failed policy. For that, President Bush must be held responsible.

StarTribune