Get off the benchmarks

SUPPORTERS AND opponents of a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq are drawing different lessons from this week’s report on compliance with 18 benchmarks established by Congress and endorsed by President Bush. Who’s right? Bush, when he suggests, as he did at Thursday’s news conference, that satisfactory progress on eight of the 18 benchmarks justifies his determination to “succeed in Iraq”? Or Democrats such as Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who described the findings as “phony evaluations” that give too little weight to the failures of Baghdad’s Shiite-dominated government to disarm sectarian militias and reach out to former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party?

Read honestly, the Initial Benchmark Assessment Report provides more discouraging than encouraging news. For example, the finding that Iraqis are coming together in “bottom-up” reconciliation is overshadowed by the scant evidence of “top-down” cooperation among leaders of the country’s religious and ethnic groups. The report doesn’t help the administration when it suggests that the possibility of U.S. withdrawal has reinforced “hedging behaviors” by Iraqi leaders; the unsettling implication is that the only way to bring Iraqis together is to make the open-ended commitment that Bush has ruled out.

But however you tote up the report’s conclusions, its significance shouldn’t be overstated. As Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, correctly observed, “We have to look on a wider scale than the benchmarks themselves.”

Such a broader view leads to the conclusion this editorial page reached in May: that Bush and his military advisors should already be planning to draw down U.S. forces, a process that should be deliberate, not abrupt, and that should commence no later than this fall. Further delaying plans -- even until September, when Army Gen. David H. Petraeus is to deliver a status report -- complicates the logistics of redeployment and provides a disincentive for Iraqis to compromise.

We would like to think that Bush recognizes this reality. There was a glimmer of such realization in his observation that this week’s report is an “interim” document and that the country will have a “clearer picture of how the new strategy is unfolding” in September. The question the president didn’t answer is what happens if two months pass and the Iraqi government still falls short. Bush told reporters that, depending on what Petraeus tells him, he might “make another decision, if need be.”

Americans tired of this war will want to interpret those words as a plea for just a little more time. The alternative explanation -- that Bush would escalate the war further “if need be” -- is frightening to contemplate and would meet with fierce opposition domestically and abroad. But the president encourages such speculation when he continues to portray Iraq as the central front of the war on terror and when he insists, as he did Thursday, that “we ought to defeat them there so we don’t have to face them here.” Before as after the benchmarks report, Bush needs to rethink this war -- and he shouldn’t wait until September.