A Compromise?

On this, the 4th anniversary of our victory in Iraq , our Congress of the people of these United States sent down from the Hill a bill of emergency funding for the war.

Now...am I the only one who thinks this is really fucking strange? They just wrote and passed a bill to fund a war that ended four years ago. What the hell are they smoking....ummm, what the hell are we all smoking?

Ok, we all know the game that's being played. Congress passes a bill to authorize emergency funding and attaches to that bill the stipulation that we begin a redeployment (an odd term to me) of our troops in Iraq. Shrub gets the bill and, as promised, immediately vetoes it this evening. It's political pageantry. It's making a statement. It's a little stronger vote of no confidence in the administration than that which was issued a few months back. Now we go back to the drawing board and come up with something in the middle...but honestly, what does that look like?

Bush has offered up a solution. We set up (once again) benchmarks that the Iraqi government must meet in order to maintain an American presence. Now, this seems somewhere between defeatist and ridiculous to me. Benchmarks will obviously not be set up outside of the reach of what the Iraqi government is immediately capable. They will be meaningless...pointless, just another example of feigned progress. I see this move as essentially admitting we're going to be there for a very long time and probably see very little progress.

For a very interesting and quite sobering perspective on this whole debaucle you've got to have a listen to this piece from the CBC's "As It Happens" April 30, 2007, show. It's an interview with Michael Bell, former Chairman of the International Reconstruction Fund for Iraq. This is quite honestly the most realistic and honest prediction I have heard to date.