On January 10, shortly before the president announced his escalation strategy in a nationally televised address, the White House held a press briefing to explain the Bush policy to reporters. An unnamed senior administration official, speaking from Tony Snow’s podium, specifically emphasized benchmarks that will let Americans gauge progress in Iraq.
“Well, here’s — but you’re going to have to — you’re going to have some opportunities to judge very quickly. The Iraqis are going to have three brigades within Baghdad within a little more than a month. They have committed to trying to get one brigade in, I think, by the first of February, and two more by the 15th. When it comes to benchmarks, they are talking about, in a fairly short span of time, addressing some of the key legislative business, including the hydrocarbon law, de-Baathification reforms, and election/constitutional reforms.
“So people are going to be able to see pretty quickly that the Iraqis are or are not stepping up. And that provides the ability to judge.”
As it happens, the 15th was yesterday. It was the date the White House set, for itself, as a measurement of accountability. To their credit, the Bush gang wasn’t vague about when we might start to see encouraging signs of progress; they specified a date on the calendar. Yesterday.
And as Dan Froomkin noted, a “key benchmark” has already been missed, but no one seems to have noticed.
[A]t a Pentagon press conference yesterday, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Peter Pace acknowledged that only two of those three Iraqi brigades are there: “You’ve got two of the Iraqi brigades in — that were going to plussed up in Baghdad in Baghdad now. The third one is moving this month,” Pace said.
Other press reports suggest that even those two brigades are not anywhere near full strength.
And action in Baghdad seems thus far to be almost entirely led by Americans, in stark contrast to what was promised.
In fact, Froomkin noted this news item, which noted bi-partisan disappointment from the leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee about the president’s escalation strategy, “citing news reports of an overwhelmingly American-led operation despite administration promises to let Iraqi forces take the lead.
Virginia Sen. John Warner, a senior Republican, used a committee hearing to call attention to a New York Times report that the first major sweep of the Iraqi capital under the new security plan used only 200 Iraqi police and soldiers, but 2,500 Americans.
“Warner, who has warned against sending more Americans to combat a low-grade civil war, expressed surprise that the first major security sweep of Baghdad under the new plan would be conducted by so few Iraqi forces. Defense officials had stressed in recent weeks that U.S. troops would be deployed in phases over coming months – with time allowed to measure the commitment of the Iraqi government to beef up its own security.
“Gen. Peter Schoomaker, chief of staff of the Army, and Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, told Warner Thursday they were not familiar with the details of the described security sweep. But Conway added, “It is counter to what I understand to be the plan as well.”
Remember, according to the White House’s own month-old words, judging the success of the strategy is exactly what we’re supposed to be doing right now. At the president’s press conference this week, Bush said we should give his plan a chance to work, but his own team said we should judge the results based on the first major benchmark of the president’s policy.
And they came up short.
How is it possible that Dan Froomkin is the only political writer in Washington to notice?