Shifting The Failure

Suddenly, benchmarks are making a lot of sense.

Yes, President Bush has seen the light again, and it is telling him to accept benchmarks. Forget that the Democrats and the American public have been screaming for tangible benchmarks in Iraq for years. The grey matter inside the President’s head finally wrapped itself around the necessity of creating solid criteria for success or failure in our effort to police the civil war in Iraq.

Forget also that eleven Republican congress members came to the President this week and told him that their constituents are so sick and tired of the mismanagement of the occupation that they are willing to throw in the towel and call our soldiers home. The President's new willingness to consider benchmarks is unrelated, nor does it have anything to do with his ever-worsening approval rating, now lower than any President in the last 30 years. (In one of the eleven’s home district, Bush’s approval rating is a mere five percent!)

No, the President's decision to consider benchmarks is part of a larger plan to make small, incremental concessions to Democratic lawmakers while forestalling the inevitable withdrawal from Iraq. If the President can just hang on and keep our troops from coming home, he can pass his historic catastrophe to the next administraion—almost certainly run by a Democrat—and blame them for “losing the war” when they bring the troops home.

Despite the grotesque toll in lives and treasure, it’s fatally important to Bush and his dishonest, scheming advisors Karl Rove and Dick Cheney that they not take the blame for losing a war that, in reality, was never winnable in the first place. The main thing that gives away their plan to shift the blame to the next President involves language. They are desperately trying to keep their operatives talking about the Iraq mess in conventional terms.

In other words, they are trying to maintain the fiction that Iraq is a “war” that we can still “win” or at least achieve something close to “victory”. But alas, this sham stopped working months ago. Americans have come to understand that there is no possibility of conventional victory in Iraq. It is quite literally impossible to “kill all the terrorists,” and it is equally impossible to force two tribes to set aside centuries of hatred fueled by fundamentalist dogma to live together in peace.

Supporting our troops should mean getting our remaining soldiers home safely. Winning should mean putting an end to the massive, almost incomprehensible cost of this bungled occupation. Victory should mean putting an end to the biggest terrorist recruiting tool of a lifetime.

And the public understands this. Only now—years too late—does the President seem to be seeing a glimmer of the light of reason when it comes to benchmarks. But not because he wants to put an end to his horrific blunder. Because he wants to play politics until he can pass the buck to someone else.

- JT Compton

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