Iraq only meets 5 of 18 benchmarks since the great surge, but BushFraud wants 50 billion dollars for the war?

Question

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20502905/

Aren't we pretty much out of all options at this point? BushFraud says "we've never been stay the course" (whatever that means) but isn't funding the war without a plan just staying the course?

The CFR is not part of our government so why are they setting benchmarks?

Answer 1

Don't we all wish we could have jobs where we could screw things up 73% of the time?

Answer 2

Typical liberal, you are confusing facts, The benchmarks are for the Iraq government, and the surge is for the troops, how does more troops = more benchmarks? The two are not related. The troop surge is working just ask hillary, and the Iraq government is progressing. The liberals are dwelling on the Iraq government benchmarks, because the troop surge is working and only news that makes GWB look bad is reported. Do you know how long it took the USA to establish a government?

Answer 3

well america seems to have the highest ratio of morons per capita of any other first world country, as you can see from all these bush worshipers posting here.

anyone with an unclouded perspective can see that the war in iraq is now kept going just to keep the profiteering racket rolling, and to protect the investments of the powers that be.

if you think the war in iraq was to better the lives of the iraqis (humanitarian reasons) or to bring democracy to iraq (anti dictatorship reasons), all you need to do is look at the current state of affairs and see that it has FAILED TO MEET IT'S OBJECTIVE. there is simply no argument against that.

also, the fact that saudi arabia is our 'staunch ally', given that women's rights there are worse than they were in iraq under saddam, and that we would never impose democracy on them... well, you get the point... if you have a brain, that is.

Answer 4

Hey, $50 billion more will fund (buy) the Bush family and his buddies in Washington power for another 50 years!

It's worth it!

I say pay it.

To hell with the economy

Who cares if one or two of our 50 United States lies in ruin from natural disaster and hadn't been rebuilt

What's important is that we rebuild a foreign Nation we blew up over false and fixed intellegence about Iraq's WMD's.

It is for the good of the Nation!

We are a non-Nation building Nation builder!

Democracy for a foreign occupation outweighs the needs of America

When are you going to see that!

It is important that we pay off Iraq to prevent future blowback

Answer 5

first of all, the benchmarks are for the IRAQI government.. secondly, the surge is working. we have over 800 detainees that are less than 12 years old... that's 8 times what it was about a year ago. groups like al-qaeda are having an increasingly hard time recruiting, so they've turned to children more than ever before to die for them... this is due to the increase in border security and massive casualties incurred by the insurgents... they are backed up against a wall... now one of the Shiite leaders is calling off attacks against the US for 6 months... lol, in fundamentalist Islam,,, that's another word for retreat. lets them keep their image while they regroup. it won't be 6 months. trust me. but anyways, things are getting there.. we just have to be patient... we destroyed a country's infrastructure, took out their leader (as backwards as he was), installed a totally different style of governing (democracy is not the norm in that area), and all the while fighting fundamentalists.... you cannot expect things to be honky-dorie in 5 years... you're asking the impossible.

Answer 6

First of all it isn't Sept.15th. The next there wasn't any mention in the article about adding 50 billion dollars and Bush and everybody else said they would go by what the report says! So you will get your details then! I would like to see him pull out troops while still in office so the republicans get the credit and not the democrats!

Answer 7

it may very well have to come to that.

bush is as close to the insane or retarded kings from medieval europe - who ruled basically because they could, that i have ever seen in the modern era.

bush has no idea what is going in iraq OR america for that matter.

he is satisfied that the 'yes' men that surround him are covering all the bases - even though they are almost all unqualifed political appointees - while our soldiers are stuck with the grim realities of fighting in the middle of a civil war where no one really knows who the enemy is and the leaders at home wage war with the same style that madison avenue pursues an advertising campaign...

Answer 8

When is the great surge going to turn into the great PURGE? Stop giving the idiot any more funds or troops and the killing and dying will stop! It doesn't get any easier!

Answer 9

If I were Congress, I would say Mr. President you had 5 years and have little to show for it. We will no longer fund this war, I suggest you start bringing the troops home immediately.

Answer 10

true, but i am still looking for a source that says what each benchmark is. the benchmarks from the council foreign relations are as follows

Holding provincial elections. Because Sunnis mostly boycotted December 2005 provincial elections, local governments are primarily dominated by Shiites in the south and center and Kurds in the north. The Bush administration is pushing the Shiite-led government to hold fresh elections at the local level to reverse this imbalance, allow a Sunni buy-in, and pave the way toward greater reconciliation. But CFR Adjunct Senior Fellow Vali R. Nasr warns that provincial elections alone will not solve Iraq’s political woes. “The idea that elections will produce leaders you want to work with applies if you are working in a peaceful environment,” he says. “Unless the insurgents are running for office and come to the polls, it doesn’t matter.”
Passage of oil revenue-sharing law. An oil law drafted in February, as this Backgrounder outlines, has left Iraq’s leaders bitterly divided. It has drawn criticisms from Iraq’s Sunnis, who prefer a stronger role for the central government, and from Kurds, who prefer a stronger role for the regional authorities. The majority Shiites have sought to mollify the Sunnis by keeping control of Iraq’s oil sector in Baghdad, not the provinces. Most of Iraq’s oil rests in the Kurdish north or Shiite south, not in the Sunni heartland. The role of outside investors, as well as the classification of old versus new oil fields, also remains unsettled.The oil issue has sparked some disagreement in the U.S. Congress. Democratic presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) says the benchmark as stated in the bill before Congress calls primarily for the privatization of Iraq’s oil, not the equal redistribution of revenues. But others say the oil law, despite its flaws, is necessary for Iraqis to develop their untapped oil reserves and reap the profits.
Reversal of de-Baathification laws. White House officials have pressed the Maliki government to reverse laws that bar tens of thousands of low-to-mid-ranking ex-Baath Party officers from government posts. This move is part of a larger effort to make constitutional concessions to minority groups like Sunni Arabs but faces intense opposition from more conservative and religious Shiite members of Iraq’s parliament.
Amending Iraq’s constitution. The Sunnis favor an amendment to stanch the formal breakup of Iraq into regional states divided along sectarian lines. They fear the Shiites will seek a federal state in the south modeled along the lines of Iraqi Kurdistan, which would cut into the Sunnis’ share of political power and revenue. But the amendment process is purposefully difficult, says Nathan Brown, an Islamic legal scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. To change the document, the Iraqi parliament must first form a committee, which then proposes a package of amendments. Next, the parliament votes on the amendments as a package, not individually, and this requires a simple majority. If passed, the bloc of amendments must then win approval from the public in a nationwide referendum, requiring two-thirds approval from at least three of Iraq’s eighteen provinces. “[The system’s] structured so that the constitution will not develop significant changes,” Brown says.
Spending of reconstruction funds. One benchmark is the fair distribution across the country’s provinces and various ethnic groups of $10 billion in Iraqi reconstruction funds, as allocated in the Iraqi government’s budget. The monies are aimed at building infrastructure, improving services, and creating jobs for all Iraqis, but parliament cannot agree on how to equitably disperse the funds. “It's hard for the central government to get out of Baghdad and out of the Green Zone and move things ahead,” says Frederick D. Barton, codirector of the Center for Strategic and International Studies' post-conflict reconstruction project. He says the easiest way to distribute aid quickly across ethnic lines is to tie it to education or home-improvement funds but that hasn't been done in Iraq.

if you have a list of the specific goals, please share.

Answer 11

Your head is spinning because the Patriotic Forces of the United States are winning.