Pelosi Statement on Iraq Study Group Report

[bigtree]

12/6/2006 11:34:00 AM

http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=77156

Contact: Brendan Daly or Jennifer Crider, 202-226-7616, both of the Office of Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi released the following statement this morning on the report issued today by the Iraq Study Group:

"The bipartisan Iraq Study Group has concluded that the President's Iraq policy has failed and must be changed. As the November elections clearly demonstrated, that is an assessment shared by the American people.

"Months ago, House and Senate Democratic leaders suggested to the President that he implement one of the Study Group's chief recommendations - to change the primary mission of U.S. troops in Iraq from combat to training and support, which would enable the redeployment of U.S. forces to begin. Now that the Study Group has endorsed this proposal, I hope that the President will recognize that he must take our policy in Iraq in a new direction.

"If the President is serious about the need for change in Iraq, he will find Democrats ready to work with him in a bipartisan fashion to find a way to end the war as quickly as possible. We are committed to ensuring that the ideas of the Iraq Study Group, as well as the ideas of other thoughtful people inside and outside of government, are given full consideration in that process."


http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=77156


Mr. Gates' War (12-06-06)
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/bigtree

[Tom Joad]

1. I oppose training and support... the only option is cut and run. Run very

fast. And admit defeat.

[European Socialist]

2. Here. here. Save billions of $$ and thousands of lives.

[Gregorian]

3. Like we needed a special group to tell us that?

Well that only leaves very few options. We CAN'T possibly "cut and run". Where would that leave the people of Iraq. I mean, after all, Shock and Awe was for their own good. We're there to help them. And besides, we can never appear hypocritical. So we can't cut and run. Even if it's the thing to do. So we'll just have to think of a new name.

Sever and saunter.
Nip and trot.
Cleave and flee.
Slash and scamper.

I get so serious about the whole mess the criminals in the maladministration have perpetrated, I have to try a different approach once in a while. I honestly don't think leaving the people of Iraq in a lurch is the answer. Take away everyone's guns. Then feed them and bring in hospitals. Then clean up the mess.

But after people have killed each other's friends and families, I don't think anything realistic can be done. What Bush and his friends have done to that country cannot be undone. I ask for forgiveness. But it isn't going to happen, I'm afraid. Retribution is too strong. So Bush, you screwed the world. Cut and run is the only option you've let us have.

[Peace Patriot]

4. She makes two important points in this statement...

1. That Democratic leaders--both those who supported Bush's disaster and those who did not--have been making this point for over a year (and, for some of them, from the very beginning--which she doesn't quite come out and say), that the Iraq War is and always has been a failed policy, or has become a failed policy. This statement represents the CONSENSUS of the Democrats, both pro-war (wrong from the beginning) and antiwar (right from the beginning). That is the important point--consensus; and,

2. That "if" Bush is serious, Democrats will help him end the war as soon as possible, and--the important point--that MORE than the ISG ideas are needed ("as well as the ideas of other thoughtful people inside and outside of government"). She skewers Bush, Cheney, Gates, the ISG, the Bush Cartel--the whole lot of them--with this "if." Then she suggests that they might start listening to "thoughtful" people. She politely graces them with "other" thoughtful people--but I think she means all the people, maybe including the American people as a whole, whom they have ignored for five years and whose wisdom they now NEED, to get them out of their horrendous mess.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it appears to me that Pelosi is aware that FIFTY-SIX PERCENT of the American people opposed this war FROM THE BEGINNING (Feb. '03), and that the Bush Cartel greedily and arrogantly and stupidly pursued it despite that original consensus of the MAJORITY. (56% would be a landslide in a presidential election.) (--and probably would have been if Diebold/ES&S hadn't been "counting" the votes).

Anyway, I like this response of hers. It gives them little quarter. It perhaps leaves too much room for more war profiteering--but that cannot be helped, these days, in any creature of the DC military-industrial hogpen. (And we shouldn't have illusions about that, even in the best of our leaders.) But it makes room for positive change, with a very strong warning about accountability and Democrats as watchdogs.