N.Y. Post : Benchmarks: Nobody Cares

BENCHMARKS: NOBODY CARES

John Podhoretz | July 13, 2007

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.

Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) made a sodden speech the other day in opposition to the "surge" in which he declared he could not be silent about something he believed so deeply. Domenici is, not to put too fine a point on it, a poseur. It just so happened that he made his brave speech two days after he was targeted for defeat in his 2008 re-election campaign by an anti-war coalition in New Mexico. (Domenici has been in the Senate for - get this - 35 years already. He wants a seventh term.)

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.

So once again we have left the realm of honest politics and entered the realm of Kabuki theater. War opponents will add the "political benchmark" problems to their indictment of the entire effort, while war supporters will basically ignore it.

And that is exactly how it should be. Because the political benchmarks really aren't important right now. The only matter of importance is the new offensive against Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq and the Sunni and Shia insurgents who are fomenting sectarian chaos.

What is going on in Iraq is a war. For three years, America pursued a strategy that put the war in the background and the political process in the foreground. The idea was that political progress would have positive consequences on the battlefield - that free elections would choke off the insurgency's oxygen.

It made sense theoretically, and it led to three successful elections, the convening of a Parliament, and overwhelming Iraqi participation in determining their own political future.

But it turned out to be a disaster otherwise. We were so solicitous of Iraqi political needs that we neglected our own military needs.

We allowed the city of Fallujah to turn into an insurgent bomb factory because we were fearful of the political effects of invading there after the kidnapping and beheading of four American contractors in early 2004. And we didn't kill Moqtada al-Sadr, the Iranian agent and key fomenter of Shiite violence, when we had the chance.

Now we're putting security and military needs first. And just as we are doing so, we're hearing complaints from people who criticized the ineffectiveness of the war effort three years ago - complaints that we are not doing enough on the political front!

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

jpodhoretz@gmail.com