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All three networks kicked off the week with updates from Iraq, where the misnamed military surge received a public relations boost while politics made no progress whatsoever. "The Iraqi parliament has not passed a single bill that the United States is pushing for," ABC's Terry McCarthy declared from Baghdad, as the legislature left on its month-long summer vacation. In an Investigates expose, NBC's Lisa Myers quoted from a report prepared for Judge Radhi al-Radhi, Iraq's chief of anti-corruption. It found $11bn in official embezzlement, including missing medicine from Baghdad hospitals, gasoline diverted to the black market and ghost employees in the security forces: "An entire battalion of Iraqi police was found to be non-existent." The graft is enabled by the revival of a law dating from Saddam Hussein's regime that allows "the Prime Minister to block prosecution of cabinet ministers" and ministers in turn "to block prosecution of their employees."
The PR fillip came from Washington DC's Brookings Institution think tank: fellows Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack returned from an eight-day inspection of the US military in Iraq and published an encouraging op-ed article--"we were surprised by the gains" and the potential for "sustainable stability"--in The New York Times. "The White House was thrilled," reported ABC's Martha Raddatz (in the middle of the McCarthy videostream), "precisely because it concentrated on military progress and did not say very much about the lack of political progress." From the Pentagon, CBS' David Martin noted that monthly GI casualties "are the lowest since the troop surge began in February" and that "civilian casualties are down a third"--although he did not specify what metric he was using to substantiate that questionable claim.
Anchor Charles Gibson asked ABC's Jake Tapper (at the tail of the McCarthy videostream) on Capitol Hill what impact the Brookings report would have on the troops-out debate. "Zero!" was his reply. "Do you think members of Congress are going to go back to their constituents who ware asking--'When are you going to bring our boys home?'--and say: 'Well, hold on a second. Read this New York Times op-ed?' That is not realistic." Meanwhile at Camp David, President George Bush's talks with Gordon Brown, the new Prime Minister of Britain, "focused heavily on Iraq," according to NBC's David Gregory. Brown said he would decide in the fall whether to withdraw troops from Basra and "tried to tamp down concerns about an accelerated pullout."
UPDATE: the civilian casualty trend referred to by CBS' Martin was contradicted two days later by Reuters (text link). The news agency reported that the death toll was one third higher in July (1,653 v 1,227) than in the previous month.
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