Benchmarked

National Review, Feb 11, 2008

FOR a year, critics of the Iraq War have insisted that whether the Iraqi government meets political benchmarks is the most important measure of success. It didn't matter if the central government was sharing money with the provinces or Sunnis were being reintegrated into security functions. What mattered was whether the Iraqi central government had passed legislation mandating those steps, as the benchmarks required. The Government Accountability Office even produced a checklist--literally, a checklist--of benchmarks that the Iraqi government had failed to meet.

Now the standard for judging political progress has changed. The Iraqi parliament has just passed a de-Baathification law that would allow low-level former Baathists, mostly Sunnis, to re-enter the government. This law had been included in every list of what the Iraqi government needed to do to achieve political reconciliation. It will take effect as soon as the five-person presidency council has, as expected, approved it.

The critics' latest tack is to say that the law is unsatisfactory to both Sunnis and Shiites, who interpret it in different ways. Compromises unsatisfactory to multiple sides are of course a regular feature of stable, mature democracies, and even more so of ones riven by sectarian hatred and horrific violence. The critics say that the law may perversely allow the Shiites to purge even more Sunnis from security and legal institutions. But if the government wanted to chase out more Sunnis, it would already have done so. The de-Baathification law is hardly perfect, but it is an important gesture toward reconciliation.

One reason critics of the war have fastened on benchmarks is that all the security indicators have been moving in the right direction. According to military officials, 75 percent of Baghdad's neighborhoods are secure. Around the country, civilian deaths are down 75 percent, while attacks on American troops are down 60 percent since June. Al-Qaeda has been rousted from its strongholds in much of the country, and is having trouble mounting its trademark spectacular attacks.

As Wesley Morgan writes elsewhere in this issue, this progress is the result of a brilliant counterinsurgency campaign including, but not limited to, increased troop levels. Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are peddling the idea that their advocacy of a troop drawdown has spooked Iraqis into behaving better. No one on the ground believes this fairy tale, and Amb. Ryan Crocker has explicitly rejected it. If not for the surge, violence would have continued to spiral out of control, and the country's politics would have become ever more balkanized.

President Bush is committed to returning to pre-surge troop levels by July, but we should not go beneath them until we know that progress on the ground can be maintained. From the perspective of a year ago, conditions in Iraq now are nearly miraculous. Many challenges remain--from resolving the dispute over the city of Kirkuk to creating an effective, nonsectarian central government to going farther down the road to political reconciliation--but the strategic goal of eventually creating a stable ally in the Arab heartland is looking more achievable. That benchmark is the one that should matter most.