Bitter Irony

USA Today:

In a new report to Congress assessing the Iraq situation, the Pentagon also asserted Friday that the insurgency is losing strength, becoming less effective in its attacks, and failing to undermine the development of an Iraqi democracy.

The report was written last week, before the bombing of a Shiite shrine and a wave of deadly reprisal attacks. It is the third in a series of reports that Congress requires from the Pentagon every three months.

The Pentagon report claimed important successes against the insurgency and said the term "insurgency" is not necessarily appropriate any more because the synergy that once existed among various rebel elements "is breaking apart."

The report asserted that the insurgents have alienated most ordinary Iraqis.

"Terrorist attacks have failed to create and spread sectarian conflict," it said.

Meanwhile, in the real world:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 24 — The sectarian violence that has shaken Iraq this week has demonstrated the power that the many militias here have to draw the country into a full-scale civil war, and how difficult it would be for the state to stop it, Iraqi and American officials say.

The militias pose a double threat to the future of Iraq: they exist both as marauding gangs, as the violence on Wednesday showed, and as sanctioned members of the Iraqi Army and the police.

The insurgent bombing of a major Shiite shrine on Wednesday, followed by the wave of killings of Sunni Arabs, has left political parties on all sides clinging to their private armies harder than ever, complicating American efforts to persuade Iraqis to disband them.

It doesn't really surprise me, but it does really sadden me, that the Pentagon is still, after all this time, completely out of touch with the complexities of the situation we're in. Unless the report is just happy-talk for Congress, written by ideological desk jockeys with no actual relationship to the people in theater. (What does it mean when the Pentagon trying to mislead Congress is the better alternative?)