Snow full of it to the last day

The White House and Tony Snow are, once again, full of it. Snow claims that progress is being made towards the benchmarks and therefore the surge is working. The benchmarks were not set as end goals to the war. It wasn't like anyone was saying that once we reach these goals its all over. They were a measure of HOW MUCH progress should be made over the given time period as a result of the surge. Snow, and this White House, rather disingenuously try to recast the benchmarks as end goals and not as the measures of the amount of progress that SHOULD have been made over the last few months. Therefore, making progress towards the goals is meaningless since less progress was made than required by the benchmarks, no one thought that zero progress would be made.

The surge is not working. We just had the second most deadly month since we entered Iraq. Quite frankly, I don't care what anyone says, the most important statistic is the number of deaths. While the number of deaths are increasing what we are doing is failing. We may be making some progress towards our benchmarks, which are important, but these benchmarks are not nearly as important as reducing the violence. In what war has anyone ever thought that they were winning because that had installed a new government, or that government had passed laws, while the enemy is increasing the success of its attacks. Not only are deaths increasing, but we missed 11 of the 18 benchmarks. Thats a far greater than 50% failure rate. So not only is violence on the rise, but on more than half of the benchmarks we made less progress than we were supposed to. At what point is this White House, and Congress (Republicans I'm looking at you), going to face the reality that our current strategy has failed.

Madison