Cohen: A Grim Graduation Day

[RamboLiberal]

Gee Richard I seem to remember you were cheerleading for this war last spring!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13502-2004Jun28.html

The New York City schools implemented a very controversial program this year to end social promotions. One of the fail-safe points comes in the third grade, when students, for some odd reason, have to prove that they can read and do some math. It's a good thing for the Bush administration that Mayor Mike Bloomberg was not doing Paul Bremer's job. If so, Iraq would have been left back.

Instead, Iraq graduated to sovereignty two days early -- a ceremony accelerated not because Iraq was doing so well but because it was doing so badly. The event was a surprise, moved up and held within the U.S.-controlled Green Zone for security reasons. "You are ready now for sovereignty," Bremer declared in the straight-faced manner of a principal who has just shaken hands with an illiterate. We will, it seems, leave no child behind.

The real failure here is not Iraq's, of course, but the Bush administration's. It is the parent and it once set out certain goals for its progeny that, by any measure, Iraq has not met. The first and most important is security. In the week preceding the sovereignty ceremony, about 140 Iraqis were killed in terrorist attacks. A day before, a U.S. Marine was shown as a hostage and a Pakistani civilian worker, kidnapped sometime earlier, was threatened with decapitation. Iraq is by no means secure.

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But politics, too, plays a role -- the coming U.S. elections. The apparent policy of the Bush administration is to keep combat deaths to a minimum -- even if that means letting the bad guys go. It has enacted the doctrine first enunciated by Richard Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, who, in paraphrase, said, "Watch what we do and not what we say." So watch when American soldiers do not clear out infestations of militia fighters, as has already been the case in Fallujah. That might be bad for Iraq, but it's good for Bush in November.