Benchmarks: Congress sets new Iraq markers

WASHINGTON, June 1 (UPI) -- The Iraq funding bill is far from being a sellout as its many critics on left and right claim -- in fact it imposes far more benchmarks to assess progress in Iraq than have ever been applied before, a leading U.S. military expert maintains.

"As for the actual benchmarks, they are about as good as any practical legislation can get, and better defined than most academic and think tank lists," Anthony H. Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a Washington think tank, writes in a new analysis entitled "Setting the Right Benchmarks: The Opportunity for Bipartisan Progress."

Cordesman's conclusion flies in the face of current Washington conventional wisdom on both right and left. President George W. Bush has been on a high in public appearances since the Democratic-controlled Congress backed down and withdrew its demands to insert a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq into a major defense funding bill. The Democrats were divided on the issue, and anti-war activists have angrily branded the provisions of the bill after the timetable pullout language was withdrawn as a sellout.

But Cordesman argues that the bill still marks significant progress in the efforts of the new Congress to impose new standards of accountability and assessment on U.S. military and nation-building efforts in Iraq. He listed 18 different benchmark requirements in the legislation, none of which had been imposed by previous Republican-controlled congresses.

Cordesman said that the legislation's insistence on creating a Constitutional Review Committee "addresses some of the most important issues in moving toward conciliation in a sufficiently general form to avoid artificial deadlines."

He said the bill's demand to produce legislation for de-Baathification and that it be implemented could prove to be "a key step in conciliation, and reducing civil conflict, that needs immediate attention."

The measure also demanded action "to ensure the equitable distribution of hydrocarbon resources of the people of Iraq ... to ensure that the energy resources of Iraq benefit Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs, Kurds, and other Iraqi citizens in an equitable manner," Cordesman wrote. He said this was "essential for Iraq to have any ethnic and sectarian conciliation, move towards self-financing, and expand exports. (It's) a very difficult issue, and one where success is far more important than meeting an artificial deadline."

The bill's requirements to create "procedures to form semi-autonomous regions ... could prevent a major Kurd vs. Arab vs. Turcoman crisis, and allow for some form of federalism in the south," he added.

Cordesman also welcomed the legislation's requirement to set up "an Independent High Electoral Commission, provincial elections law, provincial council authorities, and a date for provincial elections." He called this provision "absolutely critical if Iraq is to move towards stability, effective governance, and create meaningful working democracy ... (to) provide a key basis for any move towards federalism as well as finding peaceful resolution of local disputes."

The legislation also requires the Iraqi government to push through a new amnesty law. This, too, Cordesman praised as "another key step in conciliation and reducing civil conflict that needs immediate attention." He called it "nearly as important as de-Baathification."

The U.S. congressional legislation additionally requires the Iraqi government to create and act upon new laws to create "a strong militia disarmament program to ensure that such security forces are accountable only to the central government and loyal to the Constitution of Iraq," Cordesman wrote.

None of this will change the fundamental realities in Iraq, but if the administration and Congress take this legislation seriously, it could make a major difference in providing a united, bipartisan approach to action regardless of whether it can build on success or force U.S. withdrawals in the face of failure, he said.

Cordesman's assessment is unlikely to convince anti-war activists who are pushing for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. And as he acknowledged, the legislation cannot transform the grim dynamics of the conflict as it has already unfolded.

But the 18 benchmarks/requirements that remain in the legislation nevertheless may prove to be a highly significant political turning point. They mark the first time in more than 30 years that a U.S. Congress, Republican or Democrat, has imposed its own input, restraints and assessments on any administration's conduct of an ongoing overseas conflict.

As such, even the compromise legislation that Bush signed marks a swing of the domestic U.S. political pendulum, bringing Congress back into the national security debate about its role in overseeing an ongoing conflict involving American troops. This is the role that the Constitution envisages Congress playing in time of war, and it echoes not only the divisive debates of the Vietnam era but the crucially important and constructive role that the Truman Committee played in overseeing wartime military production in World War II.

Cordesman therefore may well be right: The new Iraqi funding bill was not the walkover for Bush that he thought. It could mark the beginning of a new conflict between Congress and the president potentially more far-reaching than anyone thinks.