Caution: Bar lowers without warning.

I didn't notice this yesterday,

The most important form of political compromise in Iraq is not among top Iraqi politicians in Baghdad, but at the local level, President Bush asserted yesterday, in a departure from past rhetoric on Iraqi politics.

"To evaluate how life is improving for the Iraqis, we cannot look at the country only from the top down, we need to go beyond the Green Zone and look at Iraq from the bottom up," he said in a speech at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. "This is where political reconciliation matters most, because it is where ordinary Iraqis are deciding whether to support new Iraq."

In other words, no benchmarks will be met. Instead of framing on something we can objectively observe, they want Iraq to be judged on limited criteria that only they can supply.

And, a remarkably precise AP story as to how past efforts to show "success" have crippled us today.

Since 2003, American officials have pushed the Iraqis to meet schedules set more by U.S. political interests than the realities of a fragmented country.

Rather than solving problems, U.S. pressure has often created a whole new set of issues. In fact, some of the latest U.S.-demanded "benchmarks" are an attempt to correct flawed policies put in place years ago under American pressure.

For example, the battle over a new oil bill boils down to a fight over who controls the oil fields and oil revenues. In the rush to meet a U.S.-driven deadline for finishing the constitution in 2005, the Shiites and Kurds steamrolled through a system of decentralized control, with the Kurds managing fields in the north and the Shiites taking those in the south.

That enraged Sunnis, whose heartland is the mostly oil-dry central and western provinces. They fear they would be cut out of the wealth in the post-Saddam Iraq.

Likewise, the Americans themselves pushed for removing many Baath Party members from government posts, although U.S. officials insist the Iraqis went further in their purge than Washington had expected.

All of this begs the question: Even if the new laws are passed, how long will it take for the violence to cool? That could take years.

(PS. The oil law's not coming for at leat two months.)