More Time, More Troops, More Money

White House Moves the September Report Goalposts
by BarbinMD
Thu Jul 19, 2007 at 07:31:37 PM PDT
Once again the White House is moving the progress-goalposts for judging how the "surge" in Iraq is going. Remember that September report we've been hearing so much about? Forget that:
Iraq is a nation gripped by fear and struggling to meet security and political goals by September, U.S. officials said Thursday from Baghdad, dashing hopes in Congress that the country might turn a corner this summer. One general said not to expect a solid judgment on the U.S. troop buildup until November. [...]
In briefings to the news media as well as members of Congress, officials warned that making those strides could take more time than first thought.
What a surprise. Time to add the word September to the long list of administration predictions gone bad: We know where the WMD are, we doubt the war will last six months, mission accomplished, the insurgency is in its last throes and now, wait for the September report.
And from Ambassador Crocker we get this:
In open testimony later Thursday, Crocker played down the importance of meeting major changes right away and said less ambitious goals, such as restoring electricity to a neighborhood, can be just as beneficial. [...]
The much cited benchmarks "do not serve as reliable measures of everything that is important — Iraqi attitudes toward each other and their willingness to work toward political reconciliation," he said.
So, the new definition of victory is to get electricity up and running? After more than four years, hundreds of thousands of deaths, hundreds of billions of dollars spent, and restoring electricity and an attitude adjustment might do the trick? Who knew? And just as a reminder to Ambassador Crocker, here's what George Bush said when he announced his surge:
So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.
To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November...Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis...Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year...the government will reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution.
But none of those things will happen, so they are no longer important.
And do you recall the all-night Senate session held just the other day? How many times would you guess that Republican senators said we must, "wait until September" before judging the success or failure of the escala...ummm, surge? Well, they certainly must feel like fools for being used like that. Or do they think that it's a coincidence that the White House waited until the day after the Republican filibuster to announce this latest setback?
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Liberals Vow to Block Continued Iraq Funding The Politico
Thursday 19 July 2007
Seventy House members, nearly all liberal Democrats, vowed today that they would not support any more funding for Iraq military operations unless tied to a complete withdrawal of combat troops.
This is a big development. Earlier this year, liberals grudgingly voted for Iraq funding bills because they didn't want to give Nancy Pelosi a defeat. Now it seems that their patience has run out.
The next Iraq funding bill won't come up until the fall, so this showdown won't happen for a few months, but it appears to be shaping up as an epic battle between liberals in Congress and President Bush. This may be the beginning of the end for the Iraq War.
Let's Hope So.
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Michael Gerson’s Moral Advantage
By: Scarecrow

I’m not surprised that Michael Gerson, who reportedly coined Bush’s Axis of Evil framing, would conclude that atheists are inherently incapable of answering the more interesting moral questions merely because they lack an objective basis for discerning good from evil, whereas those who believe in a God have the advantage of knowing that God handed them the only objectively correct answers. After all, Gerson believes that the self-righteous religious fundamentalist who initiated aggressive war against a nation that never attacked or threatened us, a war in which hundreds of thousands have been killed or maimed and millions more turned into stateless refugees, was acting for moral reasons and sincere when he claimed that God had ordained him to do this.
But it strikes me as odd to claim as a moral advantage the inability to see that what his President has done (and Gerson has justified) in his God’s name is, on moral grounds, only barely distinguishable from the acts of the crazed religious zealots who, in Allah’s name, flew airplanes into the Twin Towers, except for the fact that the Christian had enough firepower to kill 100 times more people than the Islamists. Both slaughtered innocents while claiming to have objective, divine truth on their sides, although admittedly neither of them checked with the Pope to make sure they were answering to the true faith. Perhaps we should start a 30-year war to settle this.
It shouldn’t take a confirmed non-believer to call out Gerson’s argument for the dangerous nonsense it is. And on that point, what was the Washington Post thinking? Are we now to conduct religious wars in the nation’s media? If it’s okay to argue on WaPo’s editorial pages that atheists have a shaky moral foundation, why not have a no-holds barred battle between the Methodists and Mormons about what Jesus was doing after the resurrection, or perhaps we should resolve, once and for all, the question of Jesus’ or Mary’s divinity or the chemistry of transubstantiation, with Fred Hiatt as referee?
Gerson is right in noting that religious beliefs were important to many of the theistic founding fathers. But unlike Gerson’s Presidential hero, they understood clearly the critical importance of this . . .
Congress shall make no law . . . respecting the establishment of religion.
. . . whereas Mr. Bush is anxious to use the White House to fund his favorite sects if he thinks it will help Republicans win elections.