The Measure of Things
Congress wrestles with how to judge whether there is progress in Iraq
Vice President Dick Cheney touched down in Baghdad last week to apply his unique brand of pressure to an Iraqi government about to be more closely scrutinized than ever on Capitol Hill. While urging Iraqi lawmakers to move ahead with the pressing business before them, he added, in no small aside, that it would also be best to forgo a planned two-month summer holiday. "Any undue delay," Cheney told them, "would be difficult to explain" back home in America.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put that point in more stark terms as he testified before Congress in a week in which a bomb rocked the northern Kurdish city of Irbil, killing 19 in an outdoor-cafe-studded region that has largely avoided the war's convulsions. A mortar, too, threatened to overshadow Cheney's trip as it exploded in the Green Zone, an event that has become commonplace enough to prompt a recent change in U.S. policy: Americans are now required to wear helmets and flak jackets at all times outdoors there-developments not lost on Gates. We are "buying them time," he said of Iraqi politicos. And, he continued, "every day we buy them, we buy it with American blood."
The high-level public comments were a broadcast to Iraqi officials: American patience for the war is running out. It was the same message that moderate Republicans delivered last week to the president in a candid, closed-door meeting at the White House. "People are always saying President Bush is in a bubble," noted Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia. "Well, this was our chance, and we took it." They presented Bush with poll figures showing plummeting party support in their districts and told him that his credibility on the war front is all but gone.
Benchmarks. In short, the president can't count on GOP support for the "surge" much longer. There is a sense "certainly by the Democrats and growing among the Republicans that there has to be some progress, significant progress to sustain [the surge] beyond September," said Sen. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican. The president last week signaled his support for benchmarks to gauge progress by the Iraqi government, if not consequences for failing to meet them.
But which yardsticks to use, and how best to measure movement forward? The supplemental defense bill passed by the House last week laid out goals such as "eliminating militia control of local security" and "ensuring fair and just enforcement of laws." Military officials point out, however, that progress on those points can be difficult to quantify. Measures that are easier to track-the House bill also calls on the Iraqi government to enact a "broadly accepted" hydrocarbon law to divvy up oil profits among Iraqis-can be helpful but may not be the path to reconciliation that many hope, says Frederick Kagan, a neoconservative military expert at the American Enterprise Institute and one of the chief architects of the surge. "Sunnis aren't fighting because of the hydrocarbon law," he says. "They're fighting because they still think they should be in control of the country."
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