Three Words: Troop Readiness Levels

Fox News boasts that the President has won the standoff with Democrats over the supplemental Iraq war funding bill, and NPR reports that "Democrats appear to have blinked" in the stare down between the White House and the Hill. There are three words I need to hear now from Congressional Dems, and those words are not "Memorial Day Recess."

House and Senate Democrats both acknowledged today that a date-certain withdrawal from Iraq will not be part of the language of the new bill that will go to the President. Okay, we sort of saw that coming. The Democratic leadership will take a lashing from Dems who insist we need to get out of Iraq ASAP. Much as I agree, I'm already over that and resigned to the political reality of the troop funding spin. Democrats don't think they can afford to take the fall if the public perceives a lack of support for the troops, and they're not sure the President won't end up on the high side of this particular debate.

Discussion now needs to turn to troop readiness levels, and it needs to do so loudly and repeatedly. I can't think of a single White House talking head who will come up with a convincing answer to the question "How do you justify sending under-equipped troops back into combat?"

Instead of troop readiness levels, discussion this afternoon revolves around benchmarks for Iraqi lawmakers and the Iraqi army. I can't even get excited enough about this topic to seriously assess it. If the fighting stopped then maybe--maybe--the Iraqi government could meet some benchmarks. But the fighting isn't going to stop and any discussion of benchmarks is a completely transparent, and deplorable, attempt to shift responsibility for the entirety of the current state of disrepair onto the Iraqis, without acknowledging the U.S. role in throwing the country into chaos.

I don't know enough about Jack Murtha and the nuances of intra-Democratic politics to grasp why troop readiness levels has not been the standard of Congressional oversight all along, but I firmly believe that, if we want to measure anything, we ought to measure our own performance in the field, and be prepared to show the American public that our troops are supported in word and deed.