Bleak Assesment on Iraq Irks Congress
Report Filed- 9/05/07
WASHINGTON – Comptroller General David Walker’s testimony before Congress gave a bleak assessment of the competency of the Iraqi government and its backers in Washington. But some members of Congress questioned the merits of the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) “benchmark system” and its adequacy as an appropriate measure to judge the Iraqi and US government’s achievements in Iraq.
The benchmarks the GAO used to judge the Iraqi government’s performance are derived from commitments made by the Iraqi government in June 2006 and are goals that the Iraqi government had set for themselves, with Washington’s support. The report to the House Armed Services Committee consisted of 18 benchmarks split up into legislative, security, and economic categories. The bottom line, according to the report, is that the Iraqi government failed at achieving the vast majority of these. Three of the benchmarks had been fully met, four had been “partially” met, and 11 had not been met at all. By most accounts this is widely perceived as a failure on the parts of the Iraqi government and the US government, although GAO Comptroller General David Walker stressed that this was not a measure of the government’s progress but rather a report card on whether or not the benchmarks were met. Walker said that the government report in two weeks would measure the overall progress. “It is not enough to look at readiness, but we also have to look at reliability, and whether progress is transferable and
sustainable,” he responded when questioned about Iraqi progress that wasn’t reflected in the GAO report.
Most members of Congress present were united in believing that the benchmarks for judging the Iraqi government were narrow and did not coincide with the United States’ overall strategic goals in the region, rendering the system behind the report fairly ineffectual in providing a bigger picture of the region as a whole. Representative Thornberry (R-TX) questioned whether certain benchmarks were given more weight than others, and Mr.Walker indicated that there was no system of weighing one benchmark’s importance against another. Representative Snyder (D-AR) added on to this comment stating that the benchmarks should be more representative of the United States’ strategic long term goals in the region.
Members of the Committee questioned the issue of violence stating that General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s assessments may fair different than the GAO’s. Petraeus and Crocker are expected to give their own assessment of progress in the next few days. Mr. Walker responded by saying that July’s decrease in violence does not mark a trend, and traditionally the month before Ramadan marks a decrease in violence followed by an increase during the month of Ramadan. He also stated that it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between ethno-centric violence and indiscriminate violence, and it would be beneficial to concentrate on violence as a whole rather than subsets of violence because no one can absolutely state what “type” of violence occurred.
Mr. Walker’s testimony highlighted the failures of the Iraqi government, its US backers, and the gaps in the GAO’s own system for measuring success and failure. The benchmarks in question were not set forward with deadlines, nor were they representative of the US government’s strategic goals, and some of the legislation was still in the process of being passed as a bill in the Iraqi Parliament. It did succeed in confusing people further as to how success can be measured in Iraq by any party involved. When Representative Thornberry asked Mr. Walker about legislation on Social Security, “If you were to give us a grade on how well we’ve done on that, it would be ‘not met’ right?” Mr. Walker replied, “it would be failure.” This exchange represented the stringent nature of the report, but the grading policies alone cannot be held responsible for such widespread failure. Walker suggested that Congress would probably be more pleased with the assessment that General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker will give later in the week.
