"If 20 people killed a day is good news, that tells you how bad things were previously."

WASHINGTON, July 11 — The Bush administration will assert in the next few days that progress in carrying out the new American strategy in Iraq has been satisfactory on nearly half of the 18 benchmarks set by Congress, according to several administration officials.

Iraqi Progress on Benchmarks But it will qualify some verdicts by saying that even when the political performance of the Iraqi government has been unsatisfactory, it is too early to make final judgments, the officials said.

The administration’s decision to qualify many of the political benchmarks will enable it to present a more optimistic assessment than if it had provided the pass-fail judgment sought by Congress when it approved funding for the war this spring.

The administration officials who provided details of the draft report to The New York Times, insisting on anonymity, did so partly to rebut claims by members of Congress in recent days that almost no progress had been made in Iraq since President Bush altered course by ordering the deployment of about 30,000 additional troops earlier this year.

The report will land in the middle of a two-week Senate debate that has pitted advocates of an early American troop withdrawal against Mr. Bush, who wants to defer major policy decisions on Iraq until September, when a more comprehensive report is due from the top two Americans in Iraq, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and Gen. David H. Petraeus.

The White House report says the most progress has been achieved in the military realm. The American command’s latest unpublished monthly figures, prepared for the White House report, show a substantial decline in two major categories of violence, the number of Iraqi civilians killed in sectarian violence and casualties from car and truck bomb explosions.

But the report also acknowledges that some military benchmarks have not been met, including improvements in the ability and political neutrality of the Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi government. Even in some areas where the report will cite progress, the officials in Washington said the document would acknowledge that the overall goal of political reconciliation remained elusive and would chide the Iraqis for failing to take advantage of the presence of more American troops to take more far-reaching steps.

Administration officials said the report could be made public as early as Thursday, though the White House said the timing of the release had not been determined. At the same time, officials said, the White House would like to avoid giving Congress ammunition to use in seeking to enact restrictions on the United States military presence in Iraq.

The report will “not conclude, as it has been characterized, that this is a colossal failure,â€