In the next two weeks, Joe Knollenberg and the rest of Congress will be receiving several reports on the war in Iraq. Is it too much for the people of the Ninth District to ask that our representative in Washington look past the Bush Administration’s propaganda and take some interest in the real facts?

There’s not much hope. Representative Knollenberg is so uninterested in Iraq that he doesn’t have a section devoted to it on his official website. Instead, he lumps it into a “National Security and Immigration” section that spends more time on U.S.-Canadian border security than it does on an ongoing war.

Still, we have to hope that Representative Knollenberg is willing to find the truth and take actions to stop the madness in Iraq.

He’ll hear claims from the U.S. military that sectarian violence is down since the surge began. But will he take that at face value, or will he realize that the numbers are bogus? The military says that, instead of 1,200 Iraqis dying every month in the civil war, there are now only a thousand deaths each month. But to get that result - which isn’t great to begin with - they have to bury their heads in the desert sands and claim that car bombs don’t count as sectarian violence.

Car bombs, you see, are the result of “terrorists”. Of course, the President keeps telling us that we’re in Iraq to fight terrorism, so you would think that it would be important that more people are being killed by terrorists. Hopefully, Representative Knollenberg will think the same way.

Or the congressman could choose to believe the Iraqi government, which says that war-related civilian deaths are up since the surge began, not down. According to the L.A. Times, government sources said there were 1,773 civilian deaths in August, as opposed to 1,646 in February, the month before President Bush escalated the war.

We also need to avoid the trap of letting those numbers become just numbers. According to those same sources, about 15,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the first eight months of 2007. That’s five times more than were killed on 9/11 - and we’re in the fifth year of the war. The Iraq Body Count project estimates that over 70,000 civilians have died since 2003, enough to fill a large football stadium.

And remember, those are civilians. Not soldiers, not terrorists, not “insurgents”. We are talking about tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children who have died for no greater crime than being an Iraqi.

Maybe Congressman Knollenberg could rationalize all of this, if he believed that genuine progress was being made. But he must know that it is not. When Congress allowed the Bush Administration’s surge in the spring, it was with the understanding that the Iraqi government would be held accountable, and that if they didn’t step up, we’d stand down.

They haven’t stood up. The GAO’s official report says that the Iraqi government has met three of the 18 benchmarks that President Bush said would be so important. They’ve missed some of the big ones, too:

• Instead of increasing the number of independent security forces, the number has actually gone down since March.
• Political intervention in security matters continues to be a problem.
• Security forces have continued to commit sectarian abuses.
• Sectarian militias still control local security forces.
• Only one of eight legislative benchmarks - the protection of minority legislators’ rights - has been met, and even that came with no accompanying protection of rights for minority citizens.

At the beginning of this year, many members of Congress, including Joe Knollenberg, said that would not support it after that unless significant progress was made by September.

It is now September. Violence is still high. The Iraqi government is still useless. There has been little or no improvement in Iraqi security forces.

And more than 500 American soldiers have died.

Joe Knollenberg has another chance to prove that his highest priority is the good of the United States, not the wishes of George W. Bush.

Does he have the courage to do it?