1115.org

Moving the goalposts is one thing. The Bush-men have been doing it since the beginning of the Iraq war. But saying “This is where the goalposts are” after the ball has crossed the goal line surely represents a new low? (Not just for the Bushies, but for everyone who conspires to let them get away with it.)

Here’s the L.A. Times:

Like the Baghdad neighborhoods where Sunni and Shiite Muslims and Christians once lived side by side, the early troop-buildup “benchmarks” have been whittled down to remnants of their former selves.

Now, military and government officials highlight progress on the local, neighborhood and even street level. Much of it hinges on the future of deals struck with former insurgents who until recently were aiming their guns at U.S. forces.

“There are . . . if you will, mini-benchmarks where things are happening,” U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said Aug. 21. Crocker cited Anbar province, west of Baghdad, where violence has dropped substantially since Sunni Arab leaders there began working with U.S. and Iraqi security forces.

“We’ve seen that phenomenon in different forms move through different parts of the country,” Crocker said. “It’s the steps these tribes, communities, individuals are taking. . . . You’ve got to keep an eye on that too.”

So, let’s see…

You announce a “bold new strategy” with great fanfare. In your hubris, you specify exactly what the bold new strategy — which will come at a huge cost in terms of lives and money — is intended to achieve. You make it easy to measure the success of the strategy by stating the objectives in terms of easily assessable benchmarks. You commit (after much backsliding, and dodgy calendar math, and after doing great violence to the definition of “began”) with great fanfare to a specific date for assessing progress.

And then as that date approaches, and less than 20% of the benchmarks have been met, you suddenly decide to take whatever positive developments you can scrape up, call them mini-benchmarks to dignify them with false gravity, and pretend that they validate the bankrupt failed strategy. This is the vilest, the most low-down dirty podium spin. And Crocker, and Petraeus, and anyone else who embraces this oxcrap (which presumably means the entire Bush administration, and the usual gang of think-tank enablers and media prostitutes) deserves to be spat upon and shat upon.

Because spinning this garbage — if the attempt is successful — will lead to even more unnecessary deaths than we have already inflicted, upon Iraq and upon our allies and upon ourselves.

(Just to be perfectly clear, the problem with the mini-benchmarks is what, in my old day job, we used to call ex-post selection bias: the mini-benchmarks were made up after the fact.)