White House: Half The Benchmarks Met
WASHINGTON, July 11 — The Bush administration will assert in the next few days that progress in carrying out the new American strategy in Iraq has been satisfactory on nearly half of the 18 benchmarks set by Congress, according to several administration officials.
The administration officials who provided details of the draft report to The New York Times, insisting on anonymity, did so partly to rebut claims by members of Congress in recent days that almost no progress had been made in Iraq since President Bush altered course by ordering the deployment of about 30,000 additional troops earlier this year.
The report will “not conclude, as it has been characterized, that this is a colossal failure,” one of the officials said. “It is a mixed bag, with some areas that are too early to pass judgment on.”
The report will land in the middle of a two-week Senate debate that has pitted advocates of an early American troop withdrawal against Mr. Bush, who wants to defer major policy decisions on Iraq until September, when a more comprehensive report is due from the top two Americans in Iraq, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and Gen. David H. Petraeus.
The White House report says the most progress has been achieved in the military realm. The American command’s latest unpublished monthly figures, prepared for the White House report, show a substantial decline in two major categories of violence, the number of Iraqi civilians killed in sectarian violence and casualties from car and truck bomb explosions.
- NY Times
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who the hell came up with the amnesty for insurgents idea? The only amnesty they give us is death. I think we should reciprocate. “Whereas the insurgents no longer wish to continue the spread of terror throughout the country of Iraq, We hereby decree that all heads of those insurgents surrendering,captured, or wounded shall be removed and placed on pikes.” Now that would be a good amnesty program.
July 12th, 2007 at 1:36 amTo some the glass is half empty, to others it’s half full. Shall we chat?
July 12th, 2007 at 1:40 amit’s a pity, I wish they were all full
July 12th, 2007 at 4:44 amFor 2-3 weeks of actual military activity using the surging troops … half is looking pretty damn good … think of what may be possible with 2 more months.
July 12th, 2007 at 5:39 amDoesn’t matter what the report says. Hairy Weed will still be waving his white petard with the piss yellow streak down the back of it at the cameras. And Oddball Mathews and Wolfy Smitzer will be giving him and the rest of the useful idiots all the air time that they need to rant.
July 12th, 2007 at 6:03 amRush just made an interesting point. Our Congress has a lot of nerve setting bench marks for another fledgling government when all they’ve accomplished since the defeatocrats took over are three hundred investigations. Oh, also the minumum wage. I have no problem with people making more money. One-hundred days have come and gone, they missed a lot of their own benchmarks. Easy for them to say inside the beltway. Lucky they’re not in the green zone.
July 12th, 2007 at 9:45 am