Much of the last two weeks, in DC and the Green Zone, was spent by various parties trying to pave the way for their spin on the congressionally mandated report on the escalation "surge" due at the end of this week.

That included George Bush making a surprise Labor Day PR visit to Anbar Province--a profile in courage somewhat undermined in that he stayed only in the massive Marine base known to Marines as Camp Cupcake, owing to its 13-mile perimeter, over 10,000 troops, and complete disconnect from the chaos that is the daily reality outside its well-guarded walls. While there, Bush hinted that he might reduce troop deployments by the end of the year--but on the same day, the AP was quoting unnamed administration officials as saying that his senior advisors have already told Bush that the escalation surge is going swell and not to let up now. And days previously, Bush hinted that he's already made up his mind regardless of what Gen. Petraeus has to say, suggesting that he would send still more troops to Iraq after the 15th and announcing that he would ask Congress for yet another $50 billion "emergency" war appropriation.

President George Bush unwittingly embarrasses himself on the topic of Iraq most weeks, but this was a banner week. After Anbar, it was on to Austria Australia, where, before meeting with OPEC APEC ministers, Bush blithely told Austrian Australian Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile that "we're kickin' ass" in Iraq. (My pet theory: Austrian Australian is not Bush's native language, and in the awkwardness of trying to translate his remarks, he confused the subject and object. What he meant to say was "Our asses are getting kicked." A totally understandable gaffe. The alternative, that the most powerful man in the world is living in a particularly destructive fantasy world, would be unthinkable.)

Bush was also embarrassed by a New York Times excerpt from a generally fawning new biography of him, in which the Commander-in-Chief expressed bewilderment that his administration disbanded Saddam's army in the early days of the occupation, saying, essentially: "That wasn't my policy. I don't know how that happened." The move is now widely regarded as an enormous mistake that put thousands of young Iraqi men with guns out of work and bitter toward the Americans about it--the nucleus of what became the insurgency. Thing is, Bush knew exactly what the policy was, because he ordered it--and Paul Bremer, then the US Viceroy to Iraq, promptly sent the Times the letters, memos, and documentation to prove it. Oops. (One more notch for the "fantasy world" theory.)

Meanwhile, the impartial investigative arm of Congress, the General Accountability Office, released a report that flatly contradicted the White House, finding little progress in Iraq during the escalation surge. Specifically, the GAO looked at the 18 benchmarks set by Congress. Unlike a White House report last month that tortured logic and semantics in order to find "progress" in only eight of the 18 benchmarks, the GAO found progress in only three and declared the war effort to be failing on all the most important ones.

Other indicators that things didn't have the rosy glow insisted upon by Bush and his apologists: a New York Times report that while deaths this summer are down from their peak in Baghdad--perhaps because ethnic cleansing has progressed so far that there are fewer people left for the death squads to kill--nationwide the rate of sectarian deaths is double what it was in 2006. (Even in Baghdad, it's still higher than 2006, just lower than the cooler months of Spring.) And the Center for American Progress released a study declaring that American troops can be safely withdrawn from Iraq in one year, again undercutting the war hawks' argument that without all those American soldiers and weapons the violence would get worse.

Oh, and there was also the little-noticed tidbit that Gen. Petraeus intervened to "soften" the language of the recent National Intelligence Estimate to reflect recent "progress." (Even so, the NIE basically said Baghdad was somewhere around the seventh circle of Hell.) Plus, the US leaned on five leading Shiite and Sunni exile politicians to announce a "deal" on prisoners, America's desired give-Iraqi-oil-to-American-oil-companies oil law, and a few other concessions. But it was largely for show, and American consumption: the deal didn't bring Sunnis back into the government, won't get any of the agreed-upon items through Parliament, and the remaining Iraqi politicians allegedly running the country are mostly returned exiles with no constituency outside the Beltway.

Petraeus' report is expected to praise the military effort, but condemn Iraqi politicians for a lack of progress in reconciliation, signing over all Iraqi oil to American oil companies, and other "benchmarks" dear to US hearts and/or wallets. So, in its first week back after a month-long recess, what did the Iraqi Parliament do to scramble to impress the Americans with their determination to move ahead? They met for exactly 90 minutes, with only 154 of 275 members present--barely a quorum--and read into the record 10 minor noncontroversial bills, none having anything to do with American benchmarks or reconciliation. Most of their time was spent blaming each other for the country's worsening violence (they don't seem to share Bush or Petraeus' view of the "success" of the escalation surge) and complete lack of basic government services or security. It doesn't look good. At some point American media needs to figure out that the Iraqi government is a fiction outside the Beltway and Green Zone, and barely relevant inside those places, either.

Speaking of barely relevant: Congressional Democrats, in the runup to the Petraeus report, announced that in their negotiations with Bush they were willing to settle for a "goal" rather than "timetable" for withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. (I know: Democrats, Iraq, "negotiations with Bush," and "willing to settle," all in the same sentence. Shocking, but true.) And Ret. Marine Gen. James Jones, who headed a special panel looking into the effort to train Iraqi security forces, testified before Congress that his panel found the Iraqi army at least two years away from being able to operate independently, and that Iraqi police forces were so corrupt and so infiltrated by insurgent militia members that they should be disbanded. Gen. Jones concluded that "We should withdraw." His testimony was essentially ignored by both the administration and national media.

A far more damning measure of how the escalation surge is going, namely how it's affecting actual Iraqis, emerged in late August. Over 5,000 cholera cases have now been reported in Northern Iraq, primarily among refugees living in shanty towns in areas of the country without much fighting. (The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimated last week that 4.2 million Iraqis, one in every six, have been uprooted by the war.) Why is this important? Cholera is a disease of the extremely poor, normally seen only in areas where poverty is extreme and government services nonexistent. In this case, as in much of Iraq, there is no longer clean drinking water and, of course, no public health sector to speak of. The government has no presence, local militias and tribes can only do so much, and many of the doctors and technocrats have fled the country or been killed. That's what the escalation surge means to the average Iraqi.

Want more? Iraqis are no longer eating fish out of the Tigris or Euphrates Rivers, in part because there are so many dead bodies in the rivers--which the fish nibble on--that Iraqis are afraid of contracting diseases associated with cannibalism.

If cannibalism and cholera, a country wholly without basic government services, and a lot of dead bodies are part of your definition of "success," then, yes, the "surge" is "working." Just don't tell the surviving people of Iraq. If they weren't so angry, terrified, and desperate, they just might laugh themselves to death. For citations and links for this article, e-mail info@eatthestate.org.