Maybe the president defines 'open-ended' differently from the rest of us, because it's clear to everyone on the planet that absolutely nothing could happen that would cause him to pull out of Iraq. In that same speech, in the same paragraph, Bush said, "Iraq's leaders have committed themselves to a series of benchmarks -- to achieve reconciliation, to share oil revenues among all of Iraq's citizens, to put the wealth of Iraq into the rebuilding of Iraq, to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation's civic life, to hold local elections, and to take responsibility for security in every Iraqi province." That Bush was talking about benchmarks was supposed to be a big deal. If the iraqi government didn't meet these benchmarks, we'd be gone.
Like so much that Bush says, this was BS. Benchmarks were super-important in January, but now we shouldn't worry about them. In his weekend radio address, the president announced that benchmarks don't mean crap.
Agence France-Presse:
Bush acknowledged that "political progress at the national level had not matched the pace of progress at the local level," and benchmarks adopted by the US government as a standard for assessing progress in Iraq had largely remained unmet.
But he insisted that "in a democracy, over time national politics reflects local realities" and "as reconciliation occurs in local communities across Iraq, it will help create the conditions for reconciliation in Baghdad as well."
The 18 benchmarks, adopted earlier this year, call, however, for sustainable progress in national reconciliation and mending the country's broken economy as a condition for continued US support.
The word 'progress' came up five times in Bush's address, 'benchmarks' came up once. We're always making progress, but we never seem to actually get anywhere. ..
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