In his blog Informed Comment, Middle East expert Juan Cole makes some insightful observations about the Iraq Benchmarks and the Debate here in Washington:
I personally find the controversy about Iraq in Washington to be bizarre. Are they really arguing about whether the situation is improving? I mean, you have the Night of the Living Dead over there. People lack potable water, cholera has broken out even in the good areas, a third of people are hungry, a doubling of the internally displaced to at least 1.1 million, and a million pilgrims dispersed just this week by militia infighting in a supposedly safe all-Shiite area. The government has all but collapsed, with even the formerly cooperative sections of the Sunni Arab political class withdrawing in a snit (much less more Sunni Arabs being brought in from the cold). The parliament hasn’t actually passed any legislation to speak of and often cannot get a quorum. Corruption is endemic. The weapons we give the Iraqi army are often sold off to the insurgency. Some of our development aid goes to them, too.
Cole goes on to show that troop deaths have risen and not fallen and that the Bush Administration must think that Americans are “brain dead” if they believe that this can be sold to the Amwerican Public. See his whole entry for a look at his views on the ridiculousness of the debate over benchmarks.
His points also made me think that the Administration, the Congress and the GAO seem to treat all of the 18 benchmarks equally, but there are some that are more imortant than others, such as the level of violence and the provision of basic services. Maybe we need a benchmark ranking to go along with the evaluation.
