As BarbinMD details this morning, Republicans were explicit that they expected General Petraeus to personally create and deliver a progress report this September. That won't happen. In fact, it never was going to happen. That was the first con (emphasis mine).

The legislation says that Petraeus and Crocker "will be made available to testify in open and closed sessions before the relevant committees of the Congress" before the delivery of the report. It also clearly states that the president "will prepare the report and submit the report to Congress" after consultation with the secretaries of state and defense and with the top U.S. military commander in Iraq and the U.S. ambassador.

But both the White House and Congress have widely described the assessment as coming from Petraeus. Bush has repeatedly referred to the general as the one who will be delivering the report in September and has implored the public and Republicans in Congress to withhold judgment until then.

The White House never intended to allow Petraeus to create the report. They lied. Their Congressional allies lied. And then they decided to take it a step further.

Senior congressional aides said yesterday that the White House has proposed limiting the much-anticipated appearance on Capitol Hill next month of Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to a private congressional briefing, suggesting instead that the Bush administration's progress report on the Iraq war should be delivered to Congress by the secretaries of state and defense.

White House officials did not deny making the proposal in informal talks with Congress, but they said yesterday that they will not shield the commanding general in Iraq and the senior U.S. diplomat there from public congressional testimony required by the war-funding legislation President Bush signed in May. "The administration plans to follow the requirements of the legislation," National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in response to questions yesterday.

What did they float here? They floated the idea that they would issue a report, ostensibly written by Petraeus and Crocker, and then keep all of Petraeus and Crocker's testimony secret. That didn't sell, so they will allow public testimony. Yet, they're still resisting cooperation.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee aide said that, ideally, both Crocker and Petraeus would testify before that panel. The Senate committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee have also requested that Rice appear at a separate hearing but have received no response. A spokeswoman for Levin said that the senator expects at least Petraeus to testify before the Armed Services Committee but would be happy to have Crocker as well.

Now, some cynics think that this resistance is all an elaborate ruse. The administration wants to make it appear that they are reluctant to have Petraeus testify when, in fact, they are depending on his testimony. Lending support for this theory, look at how Petraeus subtly adds another Friedman Unit (FU) into our mission in Iraq. Earlier reports said we could not sustain current troop levels (the surge) past April 2008. You do the math, (emphasis mine).:

Speaking to reporters traveling with him in Iraq yesterday, Petraeus said he is preparing recommendations on troop levels while getting ready to go to Washington next month. He declined to give specifics.

"We know that the surge has to come to an end," Petraeus said, according to the Associated Press. "I think everyone understands that, by about a year or so from now, we've got to be a good bit smaller than we are right now. The question is how do you do that . . . so that you can retain the gains we have fought so hard to achieve and so you can keep going."

He moved the surge forward four and a half months and said that we'll 'keep going' after that point.

The rhetoric the Republicans will use is already available.

This strategy of paring down enemies to shrink the pool of terrorists attacking Iraqis and Americans was on display yesterday in Amariyah. General Petraeus visited the area to pay his respects to a former member of the Islamic Army of Iraq, whose nom de guerre is Abu Abed.

According to the Associated Press, General Petraeus asked Mr. Abed to give an interview to a Sunni Arab television station, in which he promptly guaranteed the safety of the neighborhood's residents who had fled. According to the Associated Press, Mr. Abed joined the American side in reaction to the strict imposition of Islam from Al Qaeda in Iraq.

"You have to pinch yourself a little to make sure that is real because that is a very significant development in this kind of operation in counterinsurgency," General Petraeus told the Associated Press. "It's all about the local people. When all of a sudden the local people are on the side of the new Iraq instead of on the side of the insurgents or even Al Qaeda, that's a very significant change."

The emphasis on how success in turning the population against the enemy in Iraq is made possible in part by this year's troop surge will likely be a key theme in trying to persuade centrist Democrats to hold off on voting to end the troop escalation this fall. In some ways, however, it will compensate for what is likely to be a disappointing assessment from Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Mr. Crocker is expected to lower expectations for any prospect of a political compact from the national government, a point driven home in the last two weeks as Prime Minister al-Maliki's unity coalition becomes more tenuous with Sunni and Shiite Islamist defections.

It should go without saying that political progress in Iraq is non-existent, and that the situation is rapidly deteriorating.

BAGHDAD (Thomson Financial) - The death toll from four suicide truck bomb attacks in northern Iraq has risen to 400, officials said today, making it easily the deadliest attack since the fall of Saddam Hussein four years ago.

'More than 400 people were killed and the toll is expected to rise,' the interior ministry's director of operations Major General Abdel Karim Khalaf told AFP.

Actually, the death toll now exceeds 500 and Sunnis are leaving the government. In fact, the government is almost completely non-functional:

The Iraqi oil official kidnapped with four others Tuesday was in charge of Iraq's exploration and production, a key role especially for a Sunni, and a stark reminder that even the most needed aspect of Iraq's economy -- oil and the wealth it brings in -- is not immune from the horror of today's Iraq.

Abdel-Jabar al-Wagaa, a deputy minister and top assistant to the oil minister, was taken by a group of men in official uniforms and vehicles. There is no confirmation on the assailants, including whether these were from any Iraqi security force or militias dressed up.

The situation in Iraq is an unmitigated clusterfuck and no amount of anti-al-Qaeda cooperation from a few Sunni sheiks is going to change that fact. Here's an excerpt from an interview with Guido Steinberg, from the Berlin-based Institute for International and Security Affairs. He recently authored a 'study on violence in Iraq, [and] said he believes a federal solution could help the country move forward peacefully.'

Q: A referendum is due to take place on the future status of the city of Kirkuk, which the Kurds regard as Kurdish and want to be included in their province, but there is fierce resistance by Turkmen and Sunnis living there. How significant is this issue?

A: It is extremely significant. I argue in my study that it might be the most significant topic in the coming months. What we are witnessing already is an escalation of violence. It is exactly the territories where Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs live together. I think this is a deliberant attempt on the part of al Qaeda in Iraq and other terrorist organizations to provoke a civil war in the north of the country. I think if the Kirkuk issue is not solved between the political parties in Baghdad, this second civil war, in the northern part of the country, might take place.

The real danger for the rest of the year 2007 and for the year 2008 is for an intervention by the neighbors, because if the conflict escalates in the north of Iraq, if the Turkmen, for example, are increasingly targeted by the terrorists, it is more likely that the neighbors will try to intervene -- if not directly, then indirectly-- as Iran already does in southern Iraq.

Do not expect any kind of sophisticated discussion of these complex problems. What we are going to see is an extremely dumbed down and misleading portrait of Iraq. We've made some allies among the Sunni Arabs that don't like Wahhabi salafist foreigners telling them what to do. That means almost nothing in the larger picture. The larger picture is unremittingly bleak.