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All three networks assigned their White House correspondent to follow up on last night's televised Presidential speech to the nation on the future of the Iraq War. George Bush titled his address Return on Success, claiming that this spring's 30,000-strong surge of troop levels had been a military success and announcing that those extra forces would return from Iraq in July of next year. The analysis of the speech was the Story of the Day but only CBS led with it. ABC chose the CIA and torture, NBC the continuing troubles in the housing market.

ABC's Martha Raddatz went on a fact-checking tear. The President asserted: "Sectarian killings are down." The White House's own Benchmark Assessment Report found "an increase in ethno-sectarian deaths in July and August." Raddatz contrasted Bush's paraphrase of a report by a panel chaired by Jim Jones, a retired general--"There is still a great deal of work to be done to improve the national police"--with Jones' actual language: "The force is so sectarian and incompetent it should be disbanded." And when the President asserted that "ordinary life is beginning to return to normal," Raddatz dug up data from her own network's opinion poll of Iraqis: 24% say local security has improved in the last six months; 31% see deterioration; the remainder reports no change.

CBS' Jim Axelrod commented on the timing of the benchmark report. The speech was the culmination of a "weeklong, high-profile steady drumbeat of success" which started with Gen David Petraeus' testimony to Congress on the surge yet "that is a message that was undercut today by the actual report." In July, eight of 18 benchmarks were scored as "satisfactory;" current progress consists merely of a shift to nine of 18. And NBC's David Gregory pointed out that even the title of Bush's speech implicitly conceded lowered expectations: "The President spoke of success--not victory."

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert Gates came up with the same number all three networks bandied about yesterday (text link) for troop levels in Iraq at the end of the Bush Presidency--down from 169K now to 135K in July 2008 to 100K five months later. CBS' substitute anchor Harry Smith hyped that number as an "ambitious" drawdown. CBS' Axelrod noted that it was Gates' "hope--it is not an administration plan."

Monday's advertisement in The New York Times by anti-war activists moveon.org is the gift that keeps on giving. Its rhyming insinuation that Gen Petraeus might "betray us" by imparting an optimistic spin to the military facts on the ground inspired Republican Presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani to buy his own counter-ad in the Times accusing moveon.org of character assassination. ABC's Jake Tapper (subscription required) noted that moveon.org is so influential in the Democratic Party that none of its Presidential candidates had publicly disavowed the "betray us" slogan. He calculated that the ad backfired: "It allowed Republicans to talk about the rhetoric of war opponents instead of failures in Iraq."

Andrew Tyndall 9/21/07 5:38:36 pm

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