In today's New York Times, David S. Cloud and Damien Cave look at the state of the Baghdad Security Plan three months in, and essentially states the operation to secure the capital has fallen short of its goal. While this issue will be addressed in a more extensive article for THE DAILY STANDARD this evening, one of the premises--that the planners of the Baghdad Security Plan expected Baghdad to be secured by July--stretches both the imagination and the expectations of the commanders in Iraq and the senior leadership at the Pentagon. The New York Times went on to say:

When planners devised the Baghdad security plan late last year, they had assumed most Baghdad neighborhoods would be under control around July, according to a senior American military officer, so the emphasis could shift into restoring services and rebuilding the neighborhoods as the summer progressed.

I contacted General David Petraeus, the commander of Multinational Forces Iraq, this morning and asked him if there is any basis in fact to the assertion that July was a target date to secure Baghdad. In an email, General Petraeus wrote "I've never assumed we'd have Baghdad under control by July," and he reiterated what he has said consistently since his confirmation hearing in January: that it would be late summer before he and his commanders had a sense of how the surge was progressing.

General Petraeus and a host of military and civilian leaders have repeatedly said the that the Baghdad Security Plan cannot be effectively evaluated before September, and some, such as Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, the Commander of Multinational Corps Iraq, stated it may take even longer. Pushing the timeframe up to July is merely another case of moving the goalposts.