1115.org

Tuesday, October 24: Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad with the opening kick-off:

Iraqi leaders must step up to achieve key political and security milestones on which they have agreed.
[…]
Iraqi leaders have agreed to a timeline for making the hard decisions needed to resolve these issues.
[…]
They have committed themselves to a timeline for making some of those decisions that I described. And the benchmarks that they have committed themselves to — and we’ll work with them as closely as possible that they do meet those benchmarks.

Wednesday, October 25: Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki not only flatly contradicts Khalilzad, but changes Khalilzad’s well-chosen “timeline” into the dreaded “timetable”. In the season when President Bush dusts off Osama and puts him back in the store window, the word “timetable” in the context of Iraq is guaranteed to cause severe allergic reactions in many quarters. (Or did I mean hind-quarters?)

Meanwhile, in Baghdad, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki said he would not accept any timelines imposed by the Americans. …

Speaking at a news conference before Bush spoke in Washington, Maliki declared that “the Americans have the right to review their policies, but we do not believe in a timetable, and no one will impose one on us.”

Later the same Wednesday, President Bush stepped in to make everything nicely blurred and fuzzy:

The new Iraqi government has condemned violence from all quarters and agreed to a schedule for resolving issues, such as disarming illegal militias and death squads, sharing oil revenues, amending the Iraqi constitution, and reforming the de-Baathification process.
[…]
…we’re working with the Iraqi government to have certain benchmarks to meet as a way to determine whether or not they’re making the hard decisions necessary to achieve peace.
[…]
…the first objective is to develop benchmarks that the government agrees with and that we think are important. You can’t — it’s really important for the American people to understand that to say, okay, these are the benchmarks you must live with, is not going to work nearly as effectively as if we have — when we have buy-in from the government itself, the sovereign government of Iraq.

And so the step is to say to the Maliki government, which we’re doing, let us work in concert to develop a series of benchmarks to achieve different objectives.

So “(they) have committed themselves to a timeline” and “the benchmarks that they have committed themselves to” has mysteriously morphed into a schedule without benchmarks. We have a schedule, and now the first step is to persuade them to work in concert to develop some benchmarks. We have clear agreement about what dates something will be achieved by. We just have no idea what that something is going to be.

(That does, of course, leave us with the question of what Khalilzad was smoking on Tuesday. Unless it was Bush on Wednesday who was doing the smoking?)

And then on Friday, Tony Snow came along and tied a ribbon around the whole darn thing:

I want to be careful about the wording … What you do have is collaborative efforts to try to work towards a series of goals: political, economic, and security.

So we have a schedule, and everyone is firmly agreed that they will collaborate to try to work towards eventually developing some benchmarks? I got lost somewhere in that labyrinth, so I’ll be tickled pink if someone can let me know how many degrees of separation there are between the schedule and the benchmarks.

Later the same Friday, Prime Minister Maliki and Ambassador Khalilzad smoked the proverbial peace pipe. Here’s the insubstantial statement they exhaled:

“…Iraq and the United States are committed to working together to respond to the needs of the people.

“The Iraqi government has made clear the issues that must be resolved, with timelines, to take positive steps forward on behalf of the Iraqi people.

“The United States fully supports their goals and will help make them a success.”

So we don’t even have a schedule any more? The Iraqi government has made clear to us what issues must be resolved. They’ve made it clear to us that these issues must be resolved with timelines. And now the first step is to take the first step?