Iraqis Bat .300 but Benched by Benchmarks

If the U.S. Congress invested heavily in a Major League Baseball team, and the team’s roster included a player with a .300 batting average and documented potential to increase that average consistently over time, would congressmen declare the player a failure and cut him from the team?

Considering congress’s historical record of mismanagement, perhaps congressmen would cut this productive and promising player due to their misguided belief that the player should have a 1.000 average, but this would be both unwise and fatal to hopes for a successful season. Cutting players with a .300 batting average would be a sure way to guarantee the team’s failure and dash any hopes for building a dynasty franchise that could dominate its era.

Yet congress is doing just that, and Iraq is the player batting .300 that never seems to satisfy congress’ desire for a 1.000 average and a tidy return on our federal investment in Iraq. According to AP reports, a classified GAO report to be presented to congress Thursday will advise eager opponents of the Bush administration that the Iraqi government has only reached six out of eighteen benchmarks for progress previously demanded by congress. The benchmarks were established and the GAO report commissioned to preemptively rebut the upcoming surge success report from General David Petraeus. The GAO report will further the impression that the Iraqi government has failed, which congressional Democrats have carefully nurtured over the past week.

Like our baseball analogy, the problem with the GAO report is not that congress wants to evaluate how its player, Iraq, is performing. The problem lies in the benchmarks that measure overall successes only and ignore a more flexible criteria: progress. Congress set benchmarks for success for Iraq which, like a 1.000 batting average, are unreasonably high, or as Defense Department Spokesman Geoff Morrell described them, “impossible to meet.” Baseball teams annually spend tens of millions in salaries for players who can hit .300 or anywhere near that percentage, but don't tell that to the George Steinbrenners in Congress who will only be satisfied by perfection from their players and managers and who are itching to fire anyone at any time.

Congress, in ordering the GAO report, demanded that it only report whether Iraq had actually achieved the benchmarks rather than seeking to measure progress toward those benchmarks. The Bush administration considers progress to be a form of success in itself as well as hope for the future, while congress has made it clear that it is uninterested in progress of any kind in Iraq and focuses only on the Iraqi government’s “failure” to fully reach the very broad benchmarks.

Unwilling to allow Iraq, which has already reached a .300 batting average by completely achieving six of the eighteen benchmarks, congress appears obsessed with cutting Iraq from the team because after only a few years of existence as a democracy it cannot yet bat 1.000. If congress imposed such benchmarks on its own performance in providing Americans with the legislation voters have requested, it would have a far lower batting average than Iraq’s promising .300 efforts.

Other than for purely political reasons, it is hard to imagine why congress would request a GAO report that contained multi-part benchmarks designed to create the impression that even benchmarks showing ninety-percent progress could be labeled as unmet and thus failures of the Iraqi government.

It is the epitome of irony that the U.S. Congress casts stones at another government while standing in its own glass house of bureaucratic inefficiency.

GAO report Iraqi Government Benchmarks Bush Administration Congress Batting Averages Iraq War