9-06-07, 9:43 am

Democrats are crying foul over the Bush administration's shifting standards for progress in the Iraq war. While the Bush administration, since the summer of 2006, had pushed for a set of 'benchmarks' to measure success in Iraq, the White House now seems prepared to ignore independent analysis of those benchmarks and to present its own carefully vetted report to be delivered by General Petraeus as early as next week. Kerry further charged that each time the White House comes out with a new report about the situation in Iraq, 'we hear a shift in the analysis.' He added: 'The fact is that mistake after mistake has been met with not a changed policy, but a changed rationale.'

Kerry could have easily cited as evidence for the the White House's shifting stance President Bush's October 27, 2003 claim that, after months of keeping details about escalating attacks in Iraq secret, that the increase in violence was a positive sign of 'progress' because the insurgents were 'desperate.'

After it had become clear by the end of 2003 that the president's claim that Iraq possessed 'stockpiles' of WMD and thus posed an immediate danger that warranted preemptive war had been wrong, Bush shifted to claiming that Iraq posed such a threat because it wanted to re-open WMD programs. None were found, and even that argument was soon dropped.

Kerry could also have pointed to Bush's October 2005 reinvention of the rationale for the war: Iraq was a 'central front in the war on terror.'

Today it is the Garden of Eden.

Attempting to sound a note of compromise, Armed Services Committee ranking minority member Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), who earlier in the summer signaled a break with President Bush's Iraq war policy, urged a compromise Tuesday and rejected 'partisan oversimplification' and 'the binary choice between surge and withdrawal.'

But Lugar, who also voted for the benchmarks in May, appeared to echo White House talking points by saying benchmarks are irrelevant. Lugar added the enigmatic statement: “The surge must not be an excuse for failing to prepare for the next phase of our involvement in Iraq, whether that is withdrawal, a gradual redeployment or some other option.”

Is Sen. Lugar trying to have it both ways: distance from Bush's failed presidency, while doing its misleading public relations work? Can Lugar forge political space between the White House and the vast antiwar majority of the American public large enough for other congressional Republicans who are desperate to break with Bush? Can any of those Republicans who have signaled a need to change course in Iraq appear to be anything but two-faced if they fail to vote with the majority of Congress and link a timetable for withdrawal to new funding? I don't think so.

--Reach Joel Wendland at

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