If you're watching Bush speak tonight, one thing you won't hear from him tonight is the revelation about the lack of progress on benchmarks:
A new White House report on Iraq will show improved progress on just one of 18 political and security goals: efforts to allow some former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party to rejoin the political process, a senior administration official told The Associated Press.Tonight, Bush will talk about progress and success. Tomorrow, we'll learn from his administration that he's lying.
The latest conclusions, being released Friday, largely track a comparable poor assessment in July. The earlier report said the Iraqi government had made satisfactory gains toward eight benchmarks, unsatisfactory marks on eight and mixed results on two.
In the new report, the Iraqi government showed movement on only one of the benchmarks — enacting and implementing legislation on so-called "de-Baathification, which put the goal in the satisfactory category, said the official, who spoke Thursday night on condition of anonymity because the report had not been made public.
Bumped this up after the speech. This is the untold story, of course -- untold by Bush.
