Bush Shifts Terms for Measuring Progress in Iraq

[rodeodance]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/world/middleeast/05assess.html?ei=5065&en=e99bd3dddd0640f6&ex=1189656000&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print

September 5, 2007
News Analysis
Bush Shifts Terms for Measuring Progress in Iraq
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 — With the Democratic-led Congress poised to measure progress in Iraq by focusing on the central government’s failure to perform, President Bush is proposing a new gauge, by focusing on new American alliances with the tribes and local groups that Washington once feared would tear the country apart.

That shift in emphasis was implicit in Mr. Bush’s decision to bypass Baghdad on his eight-hour trip to Iraq, stopping instead in Anbar Province, once the heart of an anti-American Sunni insurgency. By meeting with tribal leaders who just a year ago were considered the enemy, and who now are fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a president who has unveiled four or five strategies for winning over Iraqis — depending on how one counts — may now be on the cusp of yet another.

It is not clear whether the Democrats who control Congress will be in any mood to accept the changing measures. On Tuesday, there were contentious hearings over a Government Accountability Office report that, like last month’s National Intelligence Estimate, painted a bleak picture of Iraq’s future.

It was the White House and the Iraqi government, not Congress, that first proposed the benchmarks for Iraq that are now producing failing grades, a provenance that raises questions about why the administration is declaring now that the government’s performance is not the best measure of change. ......