According to a report, made public yesterday, by the Government Accountability Office, "The administration lacks an updated and comprehensive Iraq strategy to move beyond the "surge" of combat troops President Bush launched in January of 2007." It cited "little improvement" where the Iraqi security forces are concerned, noted the failure to implement "key legislation" by the Iraqi parliament, found that crucial ministries had fallen off in spending their budgeted monies, and that "oil and electricity production" continued to miss targets.
Seeing as how the most frequently posed question to General David Petraeus, in two recent rounds of Congressional hearings is "So, what's next?" and that we are months away from a new Commander-in-Chief inheriting what amounts to a wholesale lack of a plan for the next step in Iraq from George W. Bush, you'd think that this would be an issue of pre-eminent concern. But, as is so often the case, you'd be wrong!
On television, the story has been almost entirely kicked to the curb. A cursory search of the airwaves in the past twenty-four hours reveals the following mentions of the story:
- One sentence mention on CNN's American Morning, wedged between reports on Zimbabwe and midwest flooding.
- Morning Joe followed with a mention of David Brooks' praise of the "surge" strategy, with no mention of the GAO report. Key quote: "Bush appears to have been right about the surge because things are a lot better in 2008."
- CNN featured an afternoon interview with Mitt Romney, who asserted that the "new surge policy...has worked." A golden opportunity to puch back with the GAO report? CNN didn't think so.
- On Fox, yesterday evening, Dick Durbin was subjected to the typical nonsense from Laura Ingraham, who said, "Democrats always have trouble embracing the good news and I think at some point the good news catch up with the narratives that a lot of Democrats have, which is it is all a disaster." READ A PAPER MAYBE, LAURA!
- On Race For The White House, Jay Carney gets points for pushing back on David Brooks by noting that his piffle came out the same day the GAO report undercut all his assertion. Of course, Carney lost those points after suggesting that Charlie Black's comment that a terrorist attack would benefit John McCain was a fundamentally true statement, because that is pure conventional-wisdom zombie spittle drooled into a microphone.
- The report was briefly discussed on Fox News at noon today, when New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez brought it up.
It's possible that other mentions of the report were made - no internet search, after all, is perfect - but at the same time, what little discussion there was simply drowned in the coverage of the election horse race.
But who can blame the cable news for largely ignoring the story? The New York Times took the GAO report and pushed it only to page six of their A-Section. Which is pretty fervent coverage, comparatively. Washington Post readers had to don their spelunking gear and descend all the way to page A14 is they wanted to brush up against news of the GAO report.
What took front page prominence at WaPo?
- Grabbing the banner is a report on "Al-Qaeda's Growing Online Offensive." A good story that might have been a fitting contrast to the GAO report: al-Qaeda's determined planning versus the Bush's administration's cluelessness.
- "World Leaders Rebuke Zimbabwe." Granted, an ignored story, well worthy of the front page.
- A report on how rising gas prices are affecting costs in other industries. This couldn't have ceded the space to the GAO report?
- A report for the locals on how the U.S. Capitol Police have been hiring recruits who failed criminal background checks.
- "Swim Teams Struggle to Stay Afloat." Wow. Really? Isn't there a whole Metro section in which this story could have gone?
- A total inside-baseball story on Len Downie stepping down as WaPo executive editor. Straight-up exercise in legacy building, seeing as how those most affected or interested in this story learned about it twelve hours earlier.
If it seems like I'm picking on the Washington Post (room certainly could have been made on the New York Times front as well), it's not without cause. Back in August of 2007, a similar GAO report on Iraq's failure "to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress" ended up on page A1. That August story was penned by the same reporter - Karen DeYoung - who wrote the GAO story that fell to A14 in yesterday's report.
Coming in the wake of Brian Stetler's recent New York Times piece documenting the drop off in news coverage of the Iraq War (which itself may not have come about had it not been for Lara Logan mourning the lack of attention to the war on The Daily Show), this raises an important question: how did news once deemed consumable enough for the front page far so fall, so quickly? (Calls made to the Washington Post inquiring after the rationale behind yesterday's story were twice forwarded to DeYoung's desk, who was unavailable at the time and has not since returned calls for comment.) One notable difference between the GAO stories, then and now: the August GAO report was leaked to the Post by "a government official who feared that its pessimistic conclusions would be watered down in the final version" by the White House.
Is exclusivity the key ingredient to forthright reportage on the Iraq War? Absent an explanation from the Washington Post, it would probably not be fair to speculate. Nevertheless, even when you leave aside the comparison, there's little doubt that news of unparalled importance to the future of our nation and its citizens, has become perilously obscured.