The long awaited report on Iraq by Gen. David Petraeus arrives in Washington on Tuesday, Sept. 11.

Since January, President Bush has sent 30,000 more troops to Iraq and there are now more than 160,000 American military personnel in Iraq, the most since the war began in 2003. After more than four years of war in Iraq, there have been nearly 3,000 American military deaths, thousands more Iraqi casualties and hundreds of billions of dollars spent.

Petraeus's report on the success of the surge is less anticipated than it once was, if only because what he is likely to say has already been leaked by other Pentagon sources and reported in the media.

In addition, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has just issued a report stating that the Iraqi government has failed to meet the vast majority of political and military goals laid out by lawmakers to assess President Bush's Iraq war strategy. The congressional auditors state that at least 13 of the 18 benchmarks to measure the surge of U.S. troops to Iraq are unfulfilled ahead of the September15 deadline, though White House officials have contested its accuracy as well as its 'all-or-nothing' reporting method.

In his report to Congress next week, Gen. Petraeus is expected to say that there have been signs of improvement in some portions of Iraq because of the surge in American troops. Politically, progress towards creating a national government capable of providing stability and security for the citizens of Iraq is the bigger question that is far less measurable and much more debatable.

Sen. John Thune and Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin told the Journal recently that they plan to withhold judgment about the success of the surge until after Congress hears from Petraeus. But both the Republican senator and the Democratic congresswoman, who have consistently supported the war in Iraq, insist that their commitment to the surge is not an open-ended one.

Saying he "trusts the commanders on the ground," Thune is confident that Petraeus will be "very candid" in his assessment of political progress. "But if they say they have no confidence in the Iraqi government, then I think we have to go to Plan B," Thune said.

Herseth Sandlin said she "never doubted that sending tens of thousands more of our troops into any place in the world would improve the security situation."

Her skepticism is with the Iraqi leadership's ability to take advantage of the surge and with the Bush Administration's tendency to change the military and political benchmarks for Iraq.

"I'm waiting for the report, but we can't continue to have these moving targets and define different measurements of success," she said.