Friday, July 27, 2007
Opinion

07/29/07 LEFT/RIGHT: I've got your benchmarks

I’ve got your benchmarks By Stephanie Ramage On July 18, at the height of the Senate debate over beginning a troop withdrawal from Iraq within 120 days, National Public Radio interviewed former...

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker speaks at a news conference July 24 in Baghdad. Crocker has asked the Bush Administration to grant immigrant visas to Iraqis working for the U.S. government, fearing that they will quit and flee the country if they're not guaranteed eventual asylum in the U.S. CREDIT: Ali Abbas-Pool/Getty Images

I’ve got your benchmarks
By Stephanie Ramage

On July 18, at the height of the Senate debate over beginning a troop withdrawal from Iraq within 120 days, National Public Radio interviewed former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The reporter posed this question to Powell: “Let’s say if you had a vote in the U.S. Senate, would you support a resolution that said, let’s change the mission, let’s start getting out in a few months?”

To which Powell responded: “No, I would not do that. I think what’s happening in the Senate now is interesting, but none of this legislation’s going to pass, and I think we are in a position where you have to let Gen. David Petraeus continue with his work and come back and report to us, but I will be more interested in what U.S. Ambassador [Ryan] Crocker has to say about the political situation.”

Powell clearly said that he would not support the pullout that some members of Congress were pushing. Yet NPR’s headline above the transcript of the interview on its Web site read “Powell: Thinning U.S. Resources Will Require Pullout.” That was a sleazy sleight of hand by a news organization that I generally respect.

Powell also said: “... Our military troops can keep a lid on this boiling pot of sectarian stew, but the main attack, as I would say as an infantry officer, has to be Iraqi political progress, and it is not sustainable for our troops just to stay over there for an indefinite period at 180,000-person strength unless there is improvement in the conditions that generate what I consider to be a civil war. So we have to have progress on the Iraqi political side.”

NPR asked Powell how long he thought we could continue at our current troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan. His answer: “I’m no longer in a position to make a definitive judgment, but my experience as somebody who used to have to deal with such matters is that they probably can’t keep this up at this level past the middle of next year, I would guess.”

Powell talked about how a ground war wears out the Marines and the Army, and pointed to the lack of fresh troops by the middle of next year. But that’s all a far cry from NPR’s headline. Busy people who don’t have time to read an entire article often take a headline and run with it. The Sunday Paper has certainly run headlines that blurred the line, but I don’t know that we’ve ever actually distorted the meaning of a story.

So why would NPR do something like that? Maybe for the same reason that the New York Times, whose staff has always made a point of ascertaining that they do not see themselves as part of a corporate behemoth, would suddenly start throwing around the über-corporate term “benchmark”: because it suits their political purposes.

The Times’ pet thug, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del), uses inappropriate phrases like “ol’ buddy” when addressing American leaders in Iraq whom he gives directives that begin threateningly with “you better.” He also loves to use the word “benchmarks,” which he employs to describe the standards by which Congress thinks we should measure our progress in Iraq. In my experience in corporate America, I found that the term is most often used to try to quantify an abstract—to define progress by the user’s subjective standards.

In a July 19 videoconference on Capitol Hill, as reported by the Times, Ambassador Crocker warned that Biden’s “benchmarks” may not be the best measure of success in Iraq. “The longer I am here [in Iraq],” he said, “the more I am persuaded that progress in Iraq cannot be analyzed solely in terms of these discreet, precisely defined benchmarks because, in many cases, these benchmarks do not serve as reliable measures of everything that is important—Iraqi attitudes toward each other and their willingness to work toward reconciliation.” That’s the real benchmark by which our success in Iraq will be judged, not Biden’s and NPR’s slippery manipulations. SP

Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.