See You in September, Whatever That Means
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: May 13, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/weekinreview/13stolb.html?ref=worldPROGRESS by September.
That, in three words, is the latest mandate from some nervous Republicans to President Bush over the war in Iraq. As the Democratic-controlled House passed yet another war spending bill last week, and Mr. Bush promised yet another veto, some members of his own party went to the White House with a blunt warning: We’re with you now, but if there is no progress by September, all bets are off.
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“Sectarian murders are down,” the president declared, though he neglected to mention that car bombings and deaths of American soldiers are up.
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Mr. Kingston, who holds weekly breakfast meetings with the Republican “theme team,” a group of about 30 lawmakers, is trying. The star of last week’s session, held in the basement of the Capitol, was the deputy prime minister of Iraq, Barham Salih, a Kurd. But equally important to Mr. Kingston was the other guest: Jason Campbell, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who is a co-author of something called the Iraq Index.
The Iraq Index is a huge compilation of data tracking life in Iraq — everything from the monthly car-bomb rate to how many foreign nationals are kidnapped to how many Iraqis have electricity and Internet access. It is long on numbers and short on analysis, though the latest report, dated April 30, includes a brief, and somewhat gloomy, summation in which the authors write that “on balance, the picture in Iraq has some signs of hope, but continues to present more grounds for worry than for confidence.”
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“It would be like the Dow Jones,” he said. “Nobody accuses the Dow Jones of being biased. It would be good information for all of us. And then you could say who’s winning and losing.”
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