05-09-2005, 11:27 AM
By Scott Johnson and John Barry
NewsweekMay 16 issue -
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 is supposed too...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7774784/site/newsweek/
NewsweekMay 16 issue -
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 is supposed too...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7774784/site/newsweek/