You're kidding right?

"Success" on the benchmarks = 18 out of 18.
Instead only 8 out of 18 of them have been met.

And you don't see failure?
You somehow see the glass as half-full?

You need to take some basic math classes.
I teach math. In my classes, 70% is passing.
Here, I'll do the math for you. Bush got 44% on the Iraq Benchmark test.
In my classroom, my students know that's a failure on their part.

Will you ever hold Bush accountable for anything?
Seriously.

One can easily see that Jan has never been in combat and hasn't spent much time working in the Middle East.

The issue has nothing to do with Bush and everything to do with the chaos of war, the mixed bag of successes and failures in a developing democracy amidst a tribal culture, and all while an insurgency and multiple terrorist groups are doing their level best to destroy each other, the Iraqis who are trying to put their country together, and fight the coalition. And by the way, don't forget to through in the interference from Iran and Syria.

Again, Jan, spend time in a few firefights and a few years in the tribal cultures of the Middle East, then come back and tell me about math, if you survive.

BTW, I did do a bit of math myself on my way to an MS in immunology and Ph.D. in clinical pharmacology. But before I got them, I did two tours in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine.

So, which "education" do I value the most? The one that involved learning the realities of chaos under fire, the experiences shared beside my fellow Marines, and the confusion and chaos of third world politics.

Tell me about math? No, Jan, tell me about the realities of war and fighting an enemy that gives no quarter and expects none. As hard as the V.C. and NVA were to fight, the Islamists are a whole different league with the sickest ideology the world has ever known. And as far as Iraq is concerned, I prefer to trust my son's view - now serving his 5th tour - having volunteered each time, and that of his friends fighting beside him, than a bench sitter whose focus is more on blaming Bush then fighting to win an important stage of a long-term war that we have no choice but to win.

One last BTW. I could care less about Bush, this war is about saving Western civilization for our children and grandchildren. We win in Iraq and Afghanistan, and win in our home countries and everywhere else the Islamists are at work, or we die as a culture and live under a sharia-based, fundamentalist, Islamic/Islamicist regime.

There's no prize for second best, no matter how hard you look the other way in the interest of a personal or socio-political agenda.

Math? With only 40% of the objectives for the Iraqi government being a clear failure, especially with 20% of the "unsatisfactory" benchmarks being benchmarks such at the passage of a hydrocarbon law, a debaathification statute and electoral reforms, overall one has to recognize that the progress made is significant.

Am I or anyone else satisfied with the Iraqi government overall progress? Hell no, the bastards need to do more and get their act together sooner rather than later. But all of us should recognize that progress is being made, albeit more slowly than we'd like, and that using a prism that benefits the enemy that wants to kill us, only serves to help them kill us.