Bush Progress

Donald Rumsfeld’s measurement standard for judging our progress in Iraq:

Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

Samantha Powers’, the Anna Lindh, professor of the practice of global leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, evaluation of the Bush administration in the New York Times Book Review:

Leaked intelligence reports have shown that the answer is negative. The administration’s tactical and strategic blunders have crippled American military readiness; exposed vulnerabilities in training, equipment and force structure; and accelerated terrorist recruitment. In short, although the United States has not been directly hit since 9/11, we are less safe as a result of the Bush administration’s rhetoric, conduct and strategy.

And what about the impact on Iraq itself? Is it better off? Not according to the researchers from the British-based humanitarian group Oxfam International and a coalition of nongovernmental organizations working in Iraq in the 40-page report released yesterday:

Living conditions in Iraq have deteriorated significantly since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, leaving nearly one-third of the population in need of emergency aid. The numbers in the report offer a contrast to the picture of steadily improving conditions painted by the Iraqi government and the U.S. military over the past several months. Seventy percent of Iraqi residents lack adequate water supplies, compared with 50 percent in 2003, while more than 4 million people have been displaced during that time. Yet funding for humanitarian assistance in Iraq has declined precipitously, from $453 million in 2005 to $95 million in 2006.

Iraq's civilians are suffering from a denial of fundamental human rights in the form of chronic poverty, malnutrition, illness, lack of access to basic services, and destruction of homes, vital facilities, and infrastructure, as well as injury and death. Basic indicators of humanitarian need in Iraq show that the slide into poverty and deprivation since the coalition forces entered the country in 2003 has been dramatic, and a deep trauma for the Iraqi people.

Two million people have left their homes for other parts of the country, the report concludes, while an additional 2 million have fled to other nations, mostly Syria and Jordan. The problem is especially acute among professional workers, the report said, estimating that more than 40 percent of doctors, engineers and other highly skilled workers have left the country.

Bush, of course, continues, impervious of the disaster he has caused, blindly unchanging his belief that God supports his position. Based on the polls, there may be no one else. His simplistic view that we are fighting a war started on 9/11 and that the only response is by military force displays such ignorance of the world and that motivations of people that it would be laughable if not for the dire consequences that wil be haunting us for years.