Bush's optimism is impossible to square with the situation in Iraq

By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent

"......But in Iraq as in the US there is a sense that Washington is playing its last cards. "I assume the US is going to start pulling out because 70 per cent of Americans and Congress want the troops to come home," Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Iraqi politician, said. "The Americans are defeated. They haven't achieved any of their aims."

The report itself admits to a sense in Iraq that the US, one way or another, is on the way out more than four years after its invasion in 2003.......

Paradoxically, Iran, unlike Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Arab states, actually supports the Iraqi government in Baghdad. It is run largely by their Shia co-religionists and political leaderswho were supported by Iran for years against Saddam Hussein. The problem here is that Washington has never been willing to accept that the great campaign it launched to overthrow Saddam Hussein has increased Iranian influence and put Shia clergy in black turbans in power in Baghdad as they have long held power in Tehran.

The "benchmarks" in President Bush's report are trivial and prove nothing. They appear to be an attempt to pretend that the war is still winnable in Iraq up to the Presidential election in the US next year.

These vain hopes of victory rule out compromises that the US still might make and are a pretence which many Americans and Iraqis will die unnecessarily trying to sustain."