Sometimes, these guys make it too easy. White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, today:
“No, benchmarks were something that Congress wanted to use as a metric. And we’re going to produce a report. But the fact is that the situation is bigger and more complex, and you need to look at the whole picture.”
Reality, as reported last week:
It was the White House and the Iraqi government, not Congress, that first proposed the benchmarks for Iraq that are now producing failing grades, a provenance that raises questions about why the administration is declaring now that the government’s performance is not the best measure of change.
Snow emphasized today the importance of looking at the “whole picture.” But that’s partly why the Bush administration and the Maliki government came up with 18 benchmarks, covering a variety of areas. That way, we wouldn’t just assess part of the conditions in Iraq; we’d be able to see whether there’s been progress in different facets of the country (political, military, reconstruction, etc.).
The administration presented a to-do list and said, “Judge us in September on these points.” They’ve successfully completed three of the 18 tasks. In response, the new line is, “To-do lists are stupid.”
The White House defense is predicated on two principal hopes: 1) that we all have very short memories, and can’t remember promises from a few months ago; and 2) none of us know how to use Google.
There was this comment from Bush, on Feb. 5, for example.
“What we’re trying to do with this reinforcement of our troops is to provide enough space so that the Iraqi government can meet certain benchmarks or certain requirements for a unity government to survive and for the country to be strong. The success of that plan is going to depend upon the capacity and willingness of the Iraqis to do hard work, and we want to help them do that work.”
The president, not Congress, was talking about the point of the surge policy and Iraq “meet[ing] certain benchmarks.”
A week later, Bush insisted that he was “paying close attention to whether or not the government is meeting these benchmarks.”
A few weeks prior, here was the White House radio address:
“America will hold the Iraqi government to benchmarks it has announced. These include taking responsibility for security in all of Iraq’s provinces by November, passing legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis, and spending $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction projects that will create new jobs. These are strong commitments. And the Iraqi government knows that it must meet them, or lose the support of the Iraqi and the American people.”
Well, guess what?
I know Snow is stepping down soon, so maybe he no longer cares about being proven wrong (again), but for him to argue that “benchmarks were something that Congress wanted to use as a metric” is so ridiculous, I feel embarrassed for him.
When the White House claims it has credibility on Iraq policy, and people laugh out loud, this is why.