http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7774784/site/newsweek/Don't ask America's top brass exactly how the Iraq war is going. They don't know. The various U.S. services have never managed to agree on a unified system for gauging successes and failures in the counterinsurgency campaign. Instead, everyone uses a different yardstick. Recently the National Intelligence Council, the information clearinghouse for America's spy services, produced a study of the problem. NEWSWEEK has learned that the document, which remains classified, urges that the present babel of war assessments be replaced with a coherent system, one that would help U.S. forces react faster and more effectively to shifting insurgent tactics and other challenges. The paper's overall tone is "not uplifting," according to a source familiar with its contents. In blunt terms, things are looking grim. How grim? It's anybody's guess.
Good luck finding someone in the administration to make that guess. America's Iraq policy is like a ghost ship these days. The administration has tried to lower its profile in Iraq, hoping to keep the new assembly from looking like a U.S. puppet. But concern is rising that America may have retreated too far. The Pentagon's three top civilians for day-to-day Iraqi affairs—Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and William Luti—are going soon or already gone. Now the State Department is in charge. Yet Baghdad has been without a U.S. ambassador for the past month, since John Negroponte left to become director of National Intelligence. The administration's top diplomat in Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, was named to succeed him, but as of last weekend his confirmation hearings had not even been scheduled. The embassy's interim boss, Deputy Chief of Mission James Jeffrey, has already been handed his next assignment. In March, when Rice appointed career Foreign Service officer Richard Jones as her special envoy to Baghdad, State Department sources thought he would be assigned at least a half dozen aides. Now an official says Jones's team is only half that size. "State is in charge of the game now," says a senior military official, "but it's too much for them."
Nothing is going the way it was supposed to. Almost as soon as the formation of a new Iraqi government was announced on April 28, suicide bombings began again. By the end of last week, the death toll since then had passed 270. "The elections were held up as a milestone," says Tom Donnelly, a military expert at the think tank most closely aligned with the administration, the American Enterprise Institute. "And politically they were. But as regards the insurgency, they're evidently not particularly relevant at all." Nevertheless, other analysts argue that the surge of attacks reflects a growing sense of desperation among the insurgents. Iraq's Sunni Arabs—even some hard-liners who until recently wanted nothing to do with the U.S.-backed government—have grown increasingly eager to join the political process.
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