Benchmarks Again?!

From the NY Times: "Mr. Bush is expected to refer to the benchmarks in a much-anticipated speech this week outlining his new Iraq strategy, including plans to send as many as 20,000 additional troops. Administration officials plan to make the benchmarks public sometime after the address."

Sometime after the address? It has taken him 5-6 weeks since the Iraq Study Group to even have this strategy ready. "Sometime after the address" had better mean IMMEDIATELY after.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said Sunday that as a practical matter, there was little that lawmakers could do to prevent Mr. Bush from expanding the American military mission in Iraq.
“You can’t go in like a Tinkertoy and play around and say you can’t spend the money on this piece and this piece,” Mr. Biden said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press.” “He’ll be able to keep the troops there forever, constitutionally, if he wants to.”

This is bad. This is really bad. At this point, it seems to me that the troops in Iraq will stay there until we have a new president in the Oval Office. It's the only logical conclusion, isn't it? We know Bush is mad. And we've seen that he'll go to great lengths to surround himself with "Yes" men, constantly looking for those who are as crazy as he is in the guise of getting as much "advise" as possible to inform his decisions. But we all know at this point he is just looking for anyone who will agree with him so he can hang someone else out to dry when this next stategy fails. And it will fail. And thousands more soldiers will die. And hundreds of thousands of Iraqis will die.

And here is the quesiton: Why? What are these people dying for?

"...the new American operational commander [Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno] in Iraq said Sunday that his plan was to send additional American troops, expected to be part of the policy change, into Baghdad’s toughest neighborhoods, and that under the new strategy it may take another “two or three years” to gain the upper hand in the war.

Repeat that: It MAY take two or three years.

Without saying what the specific penalties for failing to achieve the goals would be, American officials insisted that they intended to hold the Iraqis to a realistic timetable for action, but the Americans and Iraqis have agreed on many of the objectives before, only to fall considerably short."

So what do you think the penalties for missing the "benchmarks" would be? What happens when Iraq fails to "stand up so we can stand down"? And it will happen. Do we leave? Is that the penalty? Because if that's the case, then let's get started so we can get the hell out of there. This whole thing is making my head hurt.