STUDIES SAY.(The Talk of the Town)

Moments after the report of the Iraq Study Group descended on George W. Bush like a safe from a penthouse, its ten members fanned out in bipartisan squads to assure the world that they weren't blaming anybody. "In our report we say we are not going to review the past, we're going to be looking at where we go from here in the future," Lawrence Eagleburger, who was Secretary of State under Father Bush, told CNN. "We wanted to take the situation as it exists today," Chuck Robb, the former Virginia governor and senator, explained over at MSNBC. "As Senator Robb explained, we made a decision early on not to look back but to look forward," Sandra Day O'Connor, the retired Supreme Court Justice, concurred. "We wanted to describe the situation as we found it."

Given the provenance, authorship, and purpose of "The Iraq Study Group Report," no one need be astonished that it eschews the language of overt culpability. But because it does indeed "take the situation as it exists," and because the present is simply the past's ever-moving outer edge, it cannot help looking back. The indictment is there to see, and it is devastating. The Report's introductory "Letter from the Co-Chairs"--James A. Baker III, Republican, the former Secretary of State (under Bush I), and Lee H. Hamilton, Democrat, the former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee--frames what follows with the bureaucratic equivalent of "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here":

No one can guarantee that any course of action in Iraq at this point will stop sectarian warfare, growing violence, or a slide toward chaos.

The "Executive Summary" opens with this statement: "The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating." And the "Assessment" section--forty pages of relentlessly declarative sentences--confirms what many capable journalists have reported. It lists what it sees as some of the consequences of a continuation of current policy: greater chaos; greater suffering for the Iraqi people; a humanitarian catastrophe; escalated ethnic cleansing; a broader regional war; Sunni-Shia clashes across the Islamic world; a sharp increase in the price of oil; a still stronger base of operations for terrorists; a reduction in America's global influence; increased chances for failure in Afghanistan; greater polarization within the United States. It lists the "basic services" with which "the Iraqi government is not effectively providing its people," and they are basic indeed: "electricity, drinking water, sewage, health care, and education." And that's the good news, relatively speaking: "In Baghdad and other unstable areas, the situation is much worse."

The Study Group summarizes what it calls the "significant challenges" facing the Iraqi Army in a series of bullet points: "Units lack leadership." "Units lack equipment." "Units lack personnel." "Units lack logistics and support." All of which may be just as well, since there are "significant questions" about whether these units "will carry out missions on behalf of national goals instead of a sectarian agenda." Sound bad? Well, the dolorous accounting of the Army's condition is immediately followed by this:

The Iraqi Police, The state of the Iraqi police is substantially worse than that of the Iraqi Army.

Bada-boom. You can almost hear the rim shot. But there is nothing comic about the details: "Iraqi police cannot control crime, and they routinely engage in sectarian violence, including the unnecessary detention, torture, and targeted execution of Sunni Arab civilians." As for Iraq's Facilities Protection Services, which are charged with guarding government ministries, they are merely, in the words of a "senior U.S. official" quoted in the Report, "incompetent, dysfunctional, or subversive." ...