The "Benchmarks" are an excuse not a metric

John Podhoretz:

DON'T be fooled by the harrumphing and tsk-ing and got cha-ing: Nobody in Washington actually cares all that much about the failure of the Iraqi government to meet its "political benchmarks," which was the issue of the day in Washington yesterday.

Yes, it's very bad that Iraq's Parliament can't agree on a hydrocarbon law - which would divide the country's oil revenues between the nation's regions and its three main populations. Iraq's elected politicians are not acting on behalf of their nation's common good, and it's shameful.

But ask yourself this: If Iraq's politicians had agreed on a hydrocarbon law, would terrified Senate Republicans suddenly stiffen their spines and support the "surge" - the new military offensive in Iraq - they suddenly decided wasn't working about a week ago? The same "surge" that seems to be paying off with shocking rapidity in the once-left-for-dead province of Anbar?

Of course not.

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Would Senate Democrats revisit their campaign against the U.S. efforts in Iraq if Iraqis were suddenly divvying up its oil moneys according to a fair formula? Of course they wouldn't.

Forget politicians. If you believe the war is lost and that we should pull our troops out quickly, would your view be changed by the successful passage of a hydrocarbon law? Certainly not. You probably have long held the view that the war is irretrievably lost, or shouldn't have been fought to begin with, and so Iraqi political progress or lack thereof in 2007 doesn't matter all that much to you.

What about those of us who support the war? Well, we may be disappointed by the Iraqi failure, but we believe the stakes in Iraq are so great for America and the world that this simply isn't a good enough reason to join the anti-war camp.

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And so it goes with the elite American opposition to Iraq, whose elasticity is matched only by its disingenuousness.

The Benchmarks were always intended by the Democrats who insisted on them as a metric for defeat and not victory. They were included in the supplemental authorization as a compromise with the Democrats who really wanted to lose in the spring rather than see if the surge would work into the fall. The Democrats have had their little political theater with them and have exaggerated the shortfall putting out misleading news stories to build pressure for failure. To the amazement of the media and the Democrats the President resisted their manipulations and and political theater and will wait until September to make a decision on whether the current surge is working.