Back in May when Congress reluctantly passed a supplemental appropriation to fund American operations in Iraq one of the conditions attached to the bill was that the administration had to come back by July 15 with a report on whether the government of Iraq was making “satisfactory” progress on a list of 18 benchmarks. (Another report card is due in September.) The result was the much-ballyhooed Initial Benchmark Assessment Report released by the White House yesterday.

This led to predictable headlines about “mixed results” in Iraq, with some publications even counting up the number of “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory” grades given to the Iraqis. (The total, in case you’re wondering: eight satisfactories, eight unsatisfactories, two mixed.)

After reading the report, I can only conclude that the “unsatisfactory” grade must go to Congress for burdening the executive branch with meaningless paperwork. Many of the “benchmarks” measure such areas as “forming a constitutional review committee and then completing the constitutional review”; “enacting and implementing legislation on procedures to form semi-autonomous regions”; and “enacting and implementing legislation establishing a strong militia disarmament program.” And as the report notes:

Some of the benchmarks may be leading indicators, giving some sense of future trends; but many are more accurately characterized as lagging indicators, and will only be achieved after the strategy is fully underway and generates improved conditions on the ground.

What the Congress should have been asking is: Are American and Iraqi troops making progress in pacifying violent regions of Iraq? The answer, as the report notes, is a cautious yes. It notes a “decrease in May and June” in car bombs; “an overall decrease in sectarian violence” in Baghdad; and that “attack levels have reached a 2-year low” in Anbar Province. (For further indications of recent progress see my recent post on the subject.) Only if this progress continues will we be likely to see the kind of political reconciliation demanded in the congressional benchmarks.

But even without much evidence of a national coming-together, we are seeing some surprising grassroots political progress in provinces like Anbar and Diyala, where the tribes are deserting Al Qaeda and joining with American and Iraqi government forces. “[O]ur strategy,” the report notes, “envisions ‘bottom-up’ reconciliation to be as important, if not more important, than top-down reconciliation.” But that kind of “bottom up reconciliation” was not envisioned in the past and hence does not constitute one of the “benchmarks” demanded by Congress.

By the way, I haven’t seen any publications comment on what is the most newsy part of the report. To wit:

Expansion of the PRT [provincial reconstruction team] program is not yet complete, with only about half of the approximately 300 additional PRT personnel deployed to date. The full complement of ‘civilian surge’ personnel will be completed by December 2007.

This is a shameful admission that, four years into the war, the civilian side of government still is not carrying its fair share of the burden. The armed forces in the past few months have ponied up 30,000 more troops for Iraq, many on second or third deployments. The State Department (which oversees the PRT’s) can’t even pony up an additional 300 personnel.