...because when i read the news it seems like no one remembers:
last january, president bush announced a "surge" strategy in which the u.s. would increase the number of combat troops in iraq. the increase was supposed to lower the violence to create breathing room for iraqis to achieve political reconciliation. the reconciliation was to be measured by 18 benchmarks that would be used to evaluate whether the surge strategy was a success of failure.
so what happened? well, first the bush administration tried to claim that while only three of the benchmarks were actually met, the surge should still be considered a "success" because progress had been made on most of the benchmarks. the claims of progress turned out to be mostly horseshit.
so now the administration is switching tactics entirely. it's giving up on reconciliation, which means it's not trying to fulfill any of the benchmarks anymore. which can only mean that the surge was a failure--the benchmarks are the measure set by the administration to measure the surge's progress and now the administration itself admits that those benchmarks will not be met. the surge simply did not do what it was supposed to do.
that is, unless you completely ignore what the surge was for in the first place. which seems to be what everyone is doing. so magically, it's a success. political reconciliation, presented as a way out of this mess, didn't happen and probably won't happen. the administration isn't even pretending that the surge was a way out of this mess. the surge's "success" is not presented as anything that brings us any closer to an end to this war. the end is not even part of the plan anymore. the plan is to have no end.
