Welcome back. I agree with you that we should measure progress in Iraq and make adjustments to win. Unfortunately that is not what is happening on the Democrat side of the aisle; at least publicly.

Measuring progress is is a far bit different that setting artificial timetables that simply serves as a talking point for the Democrats. More importantly it gives the terrorists hope that they can succeed by defeating the will of the American public.

Please take a look at my synopsis of the pentagon report that was released at the beginning of September. This report talked about successes as well as failures. In particular it detailed where we have made great strides and where we need to improve. Rather than look at that report publicly from an objective point of view Democrats used it as an opportunity to highlight the bad news in the report.

Worse, this was something that hit all the newspapers. Very few made more than glancing reference to the items that I point out. When they did it was simply to claim objectivity. We all know what it really is though and it is far from objective.

The same exact thing happened with the World Opinion Poll report.

This goes beyond partisanship. It is an active attempt to undermine the current administration. This is the angle I am hoping to emphasize in my articles.

Second, to say that those who think differently than you want to “Cut and Run”, or they are traitors to the U.S. (not mentioned in this article, but has been mentioned in articles posted at this blog), grossly over-simplifies the issue. The Democrats want a way to measure progress in Iraq. We currently do not have such a measurement. The best way I can justify this position is through a business comparison. Say you are manager of several employees. Your employees do a great job, and your business receives several clients from word of mouth advertising. You know there is always room for improvement even though you are successful. You start measuring their call times with clients, and how many sales they get. You offer suggestions on how to improve themselves. How would you move forward with improvement without a measurement of where they are at? And I would pose the same question with concern to Iraq.

Look, I can’t speak for ALL people, but I think I can safely say that the majority of us want success in Iraq and in the Middle East. I think we can start moving forward if we spent less time fighting opposing parties on every idea they propose for peace.

Certainly we can find a compromise somewhere…