The Progress In Iraq

The Democrats are trying their best to stomp out any sign of good news from Iraq.  Whether the news is really good matters not to them.  They just want to ensure that we leave Iraq like cowards:

Democrats hoping to impose a change of course on the administration will have an early public relations advantage this week.

Hearings Tuesday and Wednesday will highlight a General Accounting Office report saying that the Iraqi gov-ernment has failed to meet most of the 18 benchmarks set by Congress to measure progress toward security and stability.

And retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones will testify on Thursday. He chaired a congressionally man-dated commission that officials say has made a skeptical appraisal of the extent of progress in Iraq.

US News and World Report spells it out succinctly:

Democrats are hoping this flood of new appraisals will be so bleak that congressional Republicans will be forced to change course.

And we all know who would lead this coward brigade, Mr. Reid:

As Mr. Reid reopened the Senate for business, he vowed to change the course of the Iraq war. “September is the month for policy change in Iraq,” Mr. Reid declared in his opening speech from the floor, noting that many Republican lawmakers had urged patience until the Petraeus and Crocker reports were received this month.

“The calendar has not changed,” Mr. Reid said. “It’s September. We have reached this goal. It’s time to make a decision. We can’t continue the way we are. We can’t afford it, militarily and financially.”

Their main selling point is the GAO report which was flawed when instituted, and is a flawed report since the whole concept was a foolish exercise designed to ensure some report, any report, was released that would show failure in Iraq. 

The GAO report reflects everything that has been wrong with the discussion about Iraq since the end of 2006. Through no fault of the GAO’s, the organization was sent on a fool’s errand by Congress. Its mandate was not to evaluate progress in Iraq, but to determine whether or not the Iraqi government had met the 18 benchmarks. As a result, as the report repeatedly notes, the GAO was forced to fit an extraordinarily complicated reality into a black-and-white, yes-or-no simplicity. In addition, the GAO’s remit extended only to evaluating progress on the Congressionally-sanctioned 18 benchmarks, 14 of which were established between eight and 11 months ago in a very different context. As a result, the report ignores completely a number of crucial positive developments that were not foreseen when the benchmarks were established and that, in fact, offer the prospect of a way forward that is much more likely to succeed than the year-old,top-down concept the GAO was told to measure. As the situation in Iraq has been changing dynamically over the past eight months, as American strategy and operations, both military and political, have been adjusting on the ground to new realities, the debate in Washington has remained mired in the preconceptions and approaches of 2006. The GAO report epitomizes this fact.

A number of commentators have already pointed out the absurdity of measuring whether or not the Iraqis had accomplished benchmarks rather than considering their progress toward doing so. Even the GAO found that task ridiculous, which is why, after criticism from the Departments of State and Defense, it invented the category of "partially met" as a third option, a category not foreseen in the legislation mandating the report.

But any way you look at it the big report, the one that carries the most weight is General Petraeus and he is telling Bush to stand firm, thankfully:

President Bush’s senior advisers on Iraq have recommended he stand by his current war strategy, and he is unlikely to order more than a symbolic cut in troops before the end of the year, administration officials told The Associated Press Tuesday.

The recommendations from the military commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker come despite independent government findings Tuesday that Baghdad has not met most of the political, military and economic markers set by Congress.

Bush appears set on maintaining the central elements of the policy he announced in January, one senior administration official said after discussions with participants in Bush’s briefings during his surprise visit to an air base in Iraq on Monday.

Although the addition of 30,000 troops and the focus on increasing security in Baghdad would not be permanent, Bush is inclined to give it more time in hopes of extending military gains in Baghdad and the formerly restive Anbar province, officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity to describe decisions coming as part of the White House report on Iraq due to Congress next week.

It really doesn’t matter what silly reports the Democrats sanction, what hearings they hold.  There is no way to dispute that things are turning around in Iraq.  It’s a slow process, sure.  But we all knew that going in, or should of known.  What we have accomplished in the four years we have been there is quite amazing actually.  We took out a tyrant and rebuilt a new nation from the ground up, 25 million people now have a Democracy to live under when once they lived under the thumb of a brutal dictator.  We’ve done it with a remarkable low casualty rate, and we continue to adapt and overcome when things look bleak. 

The Iraqi’s are not giving up and neither should we.

UPDATE

Rovin in the comment section reminded me that the head of the GAO is a David M. Walker.  A Clinton nominee and one who used to work for Arthur Andersen, the architects of the Enron fraud.  The same man who sued Dick Cheney in a fruitless and idiotic lawsuit which was ultimately thrown out.

No wonder the Democrats turned to them to provide some fodder for their coward machine.

Curt

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