"What Congress will get this week is a snapshot of the beginning of the retooling of the mission in Iraq," said Tony Snow, who defended the administration's war policy and argued that it's too soon to be talking about end-game strategies.
"Some of the benchmarks have been made, some of them haven't," he said. Snow confirmed existence of the coming report revealed earlier to The Associated Press by a senior administration official, although the press secretary also described news accounts about it as too gloomy.
"Benchmarks are not a way to figure out how to get out of Iraq," Snow said on CNN. "They're a device for figuring out how to succeed in Iraq."
Exactly, this was my reason for opposing benchmarks as go-no go points, and wanting us to continue to prepare the Iraqis to fight without us:
As the Iraqis meet their timetables, we can then decide whether it is prudent to pull back troops rather than reversing the order and pulling back troops while compelling the Iraqis to succeed or die based on our deadlines.
If the Iraqis have trouble reaching these deadlines, we can focus our efforts on specific tasks for getting them to that benchmark, rather than just saying that overall the Iraqis aren't ready for us to leave.
And with the focus on Iraqi success, this approach denies the enemy cheap victories of declaring successes every time our strength in Iraq goes down.
And even without meeting the benchmarks, this is happening:
Those benchmarks shouldn’t be fetishized. The reason that they were considered so important is that they were thought necessary to entice Sunnis away from the insurgency. Instead, the Sunnis have swung our way anyway, in reaction to al Qaeda brutality and to our strength.
By any measure, this is significant political progress — so significant, in fact, that no one even considered making it a “benchmark” at the beginning of the year. The U.S. political argument over benchmarks is shot through with bad faith anyway. Would the advocates of retreat really have a different position if the Iraqi parliament had managed to pass an oil-revenue-sharing law already? Unlikely.
Would anybody be happy if we had achieved the benchmarks but the Sunnis hadn't yet started defecting? Actually, yes. And I'm ecstatic that even without the legislation, the Sunni Arabs are finally getting with the program. Legislation should cement the change born of fear with the hope of a better future.
Too many people are looking for reasons to quit when we are winning. This panic is unworthy of the people of a great nation.
Get a grip, people.
