If anybody deserves break it's our boys - The Iraqi government's summer vacation

One of the three high schools I attended had a policy called “credit reduction.” Two unexcused absences from any class meant you lost a credit-and-a-half for that class. If you got your credit reduced in two classes, then you didn’t have enough to matriculate from one grade to the next and you had to make it up in summer school. The lesson was clear: If you don’t show up, you don’t get a vacation.

The Iraqi Council of Representatives is like our Congress. It was formed about a year ago and is made up of 275 members who pass laws, elect ministers and basically run the government. The Iraq Index is a compilation of on-the-ground statistics measuring life in Iraq. In the absence of a voting public, it’s basically the ICR’s report card. And according to the Index, it doesn’t look good. Of their eight political benchmarks, they have made, literally, no progress on four of them — passing new election laws, scheduling provincial elections, planning national reconciliation and disbanding militias.

Their record on the remaining four benchmarks is also spotty. On the issue of amending the constitution to include the Sunnis, the Shiite-led government missed their September 2006 deadline, breaking U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad’s (and President Bush’s) October 2005 promise to the Sunnis that they would be included later if they participated in elections that December. On the issue of reversing de-Baathification, the prime minister sent Parliament’s de-Baathifiaction Committee a draft law in March, but as of April, the head of the committee hadn’t received it. On oil revenue sharing, the Cabinet passed a law, but Parliament hasn’t voted on it yet. The one bright spot is that a group of Sunni sheiks opposed to al-Qaida will form a political party and take part in future elections.

It’s safe to say the Iraqi government is not the model of democracy the Bush administration had hoped it would be. And having failed to make any kind of meaningful progress on any of their benchmarks (and no progress at all on half of them), the ICR cannot get full credit.Yet, it is planning to take off on vacation for all of July and August.

While some Democrats in Congress are looking at a June deadline, there is now bipartisan agreement that tangible results from the “surge” tactic should certainly be evident by September. And with General David Patraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker set to testify before Congress in September, the president apparently agrees.

But to the ICR, meeting benchmarks by June or September doesn’t seem to matter. They seem to be saying that they’ll get to them by June or they’ll get to them in September. If that’s going to be their attitude, fine, so will we. As long as the ICR is on vacation, so are the U.S. Marines, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Treasury. No patrols, no troops, no guns, no equipment and no money until the ICR comes back to work. In a word: Consequences. That will be progress in and of itself.

We can use the time to practice our eventual, inevitable withdrawal and we can give some of our troops a bit of well-needed R&R at the same time. Then, in September, we’ll make the return of our troops, equipment and money contingent on the Iraqi government meeting their now world-famous benchmarks. We effectively change the deal from “if you don’t start to make progress, we have to think about leaving” to “if you don’t continue to make progress, we won’t be staying".

I realize that Asia is a continent more of tribes than nations, and that Western Asia (also known as the Middle East) is no different. But the fact remains that these two main tribes — the Sunni and the Shia — live within the borders of the nation of Iraq. It is long past time for the leaders of these tribes, in Iraq and elsewhere, to make some concessions to each other so their people in Iraq might have a future.

I say lock the Iraqi Council of Representatives in the Parliament building and tell them the clock is ticking and they’re not getting out until they’ve made a deal. If they get a deal done in time, we’ll still be there to let them out. If they don’t, when they break the doors open we’ll be gone, and they’ll be face-to-face with what they’ve brought on themselves: A civil war between Sunni and Shia which has been brewing for 1,350 years and in which they must all immediately pick a side — and fight to the death for it.