The Daily Background

Moving the goal posts:

With American military successes outpacing political gains in Iraq, the Bush administration has lowered its expectation of quickly achieving major steps toward unifying the country, including passage of a long-stymied plan to share oil revenues and holding regional elections.

Instead, administration officials say they are focusing their immediate efforts on several more limited but achievable goals in the hope of convincing Iraqis, foreign governments and Americans that progress is being made toward the political breakthroughs that the military campaign of the past 10 months was supposed to promote.

I feel as though there is a growing parallel to be made between the situation in Iraq right now and the situation after the 2005 elections. We kept hearing about how all this political reconciliation was being made, and how troops were going to be drawn down, and how violence was down, but of course we later learned that not much political progress had been made at all, and the dip in violence was only temporary– the following spring saw the greatest amounts of violence that had been seen since the invasion itself. Oh, and we sent in tons more troops. In this case, we’re hearing about how the violence is down, how all this political reconcilliation is taking place, and how troops are going to finally be drawn down. Sound familiar?

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