The Petraeus Report, by George W. Bush

Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin says you should beware of the administration's song and dance over the September report on Iraq.

If lo these many years on we're still buying the White House's line on anything, we are silly. So it should come as no surprise to any of you that the Bush administration will actually write the Iraq progress report due out in September, rather than having General Petraeus produce it as they have said he will so many times.

Petraeus will testify before Congress in both public and private sessions, but the report — which has been hailed as the harbinger of doom or the bellwether of surge success, depending on who you talk to — will be generated by the White House, and I'm sure it will carry all of the spin and vague assertions that we've become accustomed to.

Froomkin quotes Talking Points Memo's Greg Sargent in his collection of assertions about how the report would originate from Petraeus, and the revelation that it will not:

Sargent concludes: "The effort to pump up this Petraeus report was all about putting a new public face on the war, in order to separate it from all the people who lied us into it in the first place. But as it turns out, this effort was itself just a continuation of the same old mendacity. In a sane world, this would, you know, cast just a bit of doubt on the credibility of the report itself."

Credibility is hard to come by these days. I would figure that a report from a real general without this kind of micromanagement would have added some credibility to the White House's argument, unless a report from a real general would say all the wrong things.

Keep things like this in mind when you hear other White House arguments about other things, like when they assert that this intelligence, or that report, or this assessment will come from an independent source with independent credibility. You can almost bet that, on the things that really matter like whether we should go to war with Iran, the message will come from the same place as this.