Bush account comes due

This story slipped through the cracks over the holiday. Bush got his latest blood money for the war but it came at a price.

Under a little-noticed provision of the defense spending bill passed by Congress in May, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld has until July 11 to send Capitol Hill a "comprehensive set of performance indicators and measures of stability and security" two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Better yet updated reports are due every 90 days thereafter. The required statistical information is copious.

It includes such measures of the security environment as the number of engagements per day, the count of trained Iraqi forces, the estimated strength of the Iraqi insurgency and the role of foreign fighters.

It orders up indicators of economic activity, including unemployment levels, electricity, water and oil production rates, and hunger and poverty levels.

It requires detailed information on the training of Iraqi military and security forces, their equipment, and their capabilities -- and the timetables for achieving full readiness. ...It also requires documentation on their absentee rates and calls for similar information on the Iraqi police forces and their training.

Finally, it directs Rumsfeld to provide -- either in public or in classified annexes -- an estimate of U.S. military forces needed in Iraq through the end of calendar 2006 and the criteria the administration will use to determine when it is safe to begin withdrawing forces from that country.

A blessing on whoever managed to slip this provision past the GOP thought police in the Congress. If the Pentagon follows the law, we will finally get a definition of the term, "staying the course" and learn what that strategy will really cost us.