By DAVID GREEN 

The Iraq Study Group (ISG)—creators of a document aimed at helping the president find a successful way out of Iraq—makes it clear its intent is not to find fault. The members did not aim to review the past. Instead, their mission was to move forward.

While that may be the group’s intent, its review of the current situation in Iraq is nothing short of an indictment of the past actions that brought us to the present dilemma. The ISG report makes official what many have known for months, some would say for years—the president’s unnecessary war in Iraq is a catastrophe.

Wrong choices, mistakes, burying facts, general failure in policy—it’s all there, presented not by the cut-and-run enemies of the president, but by a nonpartisan group of statesmen.

The existing policy, the report says, has led to more chaos, more suffering for the Iraqi people, Sunni-Shia clashes throughout the Islamic world, lessening of America’s global influence, increased chances for failure in Afghanistan. In other words, it’s led to the opposite of most everything the administration hoped to accomplish.

The Downing Street Memos showed how the Bush administration fixed the facts to fit the policy and lead us into war. The ISG report shows how the facts of the war also have been fixed to fit the policy.

For instance, ISG shows how violence in Iraq has been grossly underreported. As an example, the official report for a day last July lists 93 acts of violence. In reality, more than 1,100 occurred. The Pentagon won’t even release violence statistics to Congress from the past three months.

You can ignore the details and fix the facts all you want, but the reality remains.

The ISG is polite in its response. There’s nothing about  obfuscation or lying. Instead: “Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.”

The authors of the report point out that none of their ideas provide a guaranteed solution to the mess and the president already appears to be tipping the chances toward failure as he turns away from some recommendations.

Rumors suggest that instead he will call for another 30,000 troops for one last chance at saving Baghdad. If we can just kill off enough of the bad guys, we’ll win. In other words, Bush’s New Way Forward will probably look all too familiar to America’s military families.

Another one of those milestones passed recently: the 25,000th American casualty. Almost 3,000 deaths and about 22,000 injured.

“It’s a number,” says presidential spokesman Tony Snow, dismissing the significance.

Just one more number to ignore.