Congress Plays Political Games with Iraqi Progress

Statement

The anniversary of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 is this week and it is an appropriate backdrop in which to consider the success of the ongoing war on terror. More specifically, the status of our efforts to stabilize Iraq should come into sharper focus as Congress prepares to hear the Bush Administration's progress report. Unfortunately, this opportunity to objectively review events in Iraq has been subverted by the House's liberal leadership in favor of presenting a biased, one-sided picture.

I was disappointed to see the liberal House of Representatives hold hearings to release a flawed assessment of the progress in Iraq in advance of the Administration's own report. Last Wednesday, the House Armed Services Committee held a hearing to discuss the findings of a Congressional study into whether 18 arbitrary benchmarks of progress had been achieved by the Iraqi government. Not surprisingly, the report had been leaked to the media so that Congressional leaders could achieve maximum effect in their efforts to prejudge our mission in Iraq a failure.

Congress called for the 18 benchmarks in a supplemental appropriations funding bill for the war on terror that passed in June. It set no deadlines for the Iraqi government to meet the objectives. However, it ordered that the Bush Administration review the progress made and report back to Congress. Yet before the Administration could give the long-anticipated assessment, the House leadership chose to release its own Government Accountability Office (GAO) evaluation of Iraqi progress based solely on the benchmarks. The results are highly subjective and appear loaded to produce a negative conclusion.

The GAO report indicated that the Iraqi government has failed to meet 11 of 18 political and security benchmarks laid out by the Democrat Congress in June. Yet, the report is not up to date (it ignores progress made in August) and it uses a yardstick of fully meeting the benchmarks (pass or fail) rather than measuring the level of progress attained. Senior military officials have already criticized the report as "factually incorrect," according to published reports.

During the Armed Services hearing last week in which the GAO report was discussed, GAO head David Walker admitted his agency did not take into account military data measuring the level of sectarian violence in Iraq. The data reflect a downward trend in such violence, yet the GAO declined to use it, saying the agency did not agree with the way the data was collected. During questioning about this, Walker told me the GAO did not say the military data was wrong. And he admitted to me that it might, in fact, be right.

It is disheartening, but not surprising, that the Democrat leadership in Congress would preempt the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who, by the time you read this, is scheduled to deliver his view of the overall level of progress in Iraq. The release of the subjective GAO report was timed to discredit and marginalize General Petraeus's findings, and as such, does a tremendous disservice to the men and women fighting the war on terror and to the American people who want full and objective information.

General Petraeus deserves to be heard and his analysis must be factored into the national debate over Iraq. It is regrettable the liberal Congress is more concerned with scoring political points than ensuring that we are successfully prosecuting the war on terror.

Source