Crocker - the dog ate my benchmark homework Posted by Max Bergmann

Cong. McIntyre asks Crocker what happened to the benchmarks? Crocker stutters and then says we are working on evaluating them and pledges to get an assessment to Congress next week. Talk about not bringing your homework. You would think you would have gotten this done before the hearing.

Comments

[Dan Kervick]

You would think you would have gotten this done before the hearing.

You would think so, if you thought they actually cared. But Bush, Cheney, Crocker and Petraeus are not interested in any silly "benchmarks". Benchmarks for what? Appeals to benchmarks suggest that there is some sort of mission, with a definable endpoint, that is yet to be accomplished. It suggests that the US presence and occupation in Iraq are designed to accomplish that further mission.

But for Bush and Co., the presence in Iraq is the mission. They've already accomplished that mission because they are in Iraq, and are digging in deeper every day. And they are not going anywhere. Crocketraeus is just here to feed Congress some scare stories about Iranains everywhere, and special groups, and discernible but incomplete progress etc., with the sole purpose of getting Congress off their backs for another six months. And they'll do the same six months after that, and six months after that, and ... until Congress finally gets tired of asking and comes to accept the US presence and deployments in Iraq as no different than the presence and deployments in Okinawa. And then the whole stupid charade of pretending to care will be over.

Despite a few tough rounds of questioning in the Congress, one doesn't get the impression that anybody in the US government is really willing to call the administration on the real world, or articulate the embarrassing reality, the open secret that everyone can see but is for some reason too timid or intimidated to bring up. But isn't there at least one brave soul who is willing to speak up and say, "Look, it's pretty obvious to me that you guys simply aren't planning for the US to leave - ever.

It is widely and openly reported that the administration is now in the process of negotiating a permanent gig in Iraq with the Iraqi government. And they are doing this in such a way as to circumvent congressional oversight to the maximum degree possible. You might think that some people in Congress would be up in arms about this usurpation of their authority, and would be hammering at this issue. Nah. All they want to do is ask questions the surge, and political reconciliation, benchmarks and all of the other phony topics that are designed to convince the American people that Congress is on the case.

And still, the facts that have been reported from the beginning of the war - that the US is building permanent bases in Iraq; that these bases are part of a system of bases in an "arc of instability" across eastern Europe, the Caspian, the Middle East and Central Asia; that the whole thing represents a strategic re-orientation and re-positioning of US
military personnel and assets in the world, and Iraq is just part of it - you can't even get members of Congress to mention these facts. This whole series of hearings is an dark, absurdist farce.

Our country appears deeply and irretrievably broken. Congress might as well not even exist anymore. Doing absolutely nothing would be preferable to the ongoing comedy, and the daily insult to the intelligence of the American people, that we call "Congress".

The "Iraq War" is just a good old-fashioned hostile takeover - Texas style. Despite the fact that such takeovers are reasonably common in US history, the US establishment is so deeply committed to the moral fantasy that their country just doesn't do those grubby old brute imperial power grabs, that they seem cognitively incapable of addressing the facts that are right in front of them, and that no intelligent observer can really deny. It's almost like they all have some neurological disease that prevents them from considering or speaking about certain areas of reality.