Frank Rich uses my line

Frank Rich's Sunday column, As the Iraqis Stand Down, We'll Stand Up, echoes a line that I used in this April post.

Despite using my line (which was really obvious, anyway) Rich's article is very good. Some insightful quotes:

'The "decrease in violence" fable is even more insidious. Though both General Petraeus and a White House fact sheet have recently boasted of a 75 percent decline in sectarian attacks, this number turns out to be as cooked as those tallies of Saddam's weapons sites once peddled by WHIG.'

'Last week the administration and its ideological surrogates were tireless in trashing the nonpartisan G.A.O. report card that found the Iraqi government flunking most of its benchmarks.

'Those benchmarks, the war's dead- enders now say, are obsolete anyway. But what about the president's own benchmarks? Remember "as the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down"? General Petraeus was once in charge of the Iraqi Army's training and proclaimed it "on track and increasing in capacity" three years ago. On Thursday, an independent commission convened by the Republican John Warner and populated by retired military officers and police chiefs reported that Iraqi forces can take charge no sooner than 12 to 18 months from now, and that the corrupt Iraqi police force has to be rebuilt from scratch. Let us not forget, either, Mr. Bush's former top-down benchmarks for measuring success: "an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself." On that scorecard, he's batting 0 for 3.'

In my April article, I neglected to give a link for the Nancy Youssef article that military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable U.S. soldiers to start coming home soon, which inspired the 'stand down, stand up' retort. She also has written some important articles on U.S. troops shot 429 Iraqi civilians at checkpoints and the U.S. arming Sunni militias.