silent patriot at crooks and liars notes that the iraqi parliament is planning a two month recess for july and august.
that means that the parliament has only 9 weeks or so to meet all of the legislative benchmarks set by bush's surge strategy. as of today, ten weeks into the surge, none of the benchmarks have been met and there has been little progress towards resolving any of them.
the surge was not supposed to be a permanent escalation (at least that's not how bush described it last january). it was supposed to be a short-term increase to lower the violence and give the parliament the breathing room it needed to deal with the hard decisions that they've been avoiding so far. it looks to me like not only is the overall violence not going down (at least not if you count bombings as part of the violence), but also that the parliament isn't going to get to any of those hard decisions.
