This past Tuesday The New Republic kicked of “May Day” by proverbially kicking Congressional Liberal Dems in the nads.
Senior Editor, Lawrence Kaplan wrote, “Maybe it was a slip of the tongue. But, when Nancy Pelosi confessed last year that she felt "sad" about President Bush's claims that Al Qaeda operates in Iraq, she seemed to be disputing what every American soldier in Iraq, every Al Qaeda operative, and anyone who reads a newspaper already knew to be true. (When I questioned him about Pelosi's assertion, a U.S. officer in Ramadi responded, incredulously, that Al Qaeda had just held a parade in his sector.) Perhaps the House speaker was alluding to the discredited claim that Al Qaeda operated in Iraq before the war.”
Ironically even that charitable last out (the one about al Qaeda not having been in Iraq prior to the U.S./U.K. led invasion has been dispelled by George Tenet whose recent book claims that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was operating in Iraq as early as May of 2002.
At any rate , Kaplan honestly assesses the possibilities in this way, “What is going on here? There are two possibilities: First, Reid and Pelosi could be purposefully minimizing the stakes in Iraq. Or, second, they don't know what they're talking about. My guess is some combination of the two. Political maneuvering certainly contributes to the everyday pollution of Iraq discourse. But a lot of the pollution derives from legislators being functionally illiterate about the war over which Congress now intends to preside. In this, of course, they're hardly alone.”
More perplexing still is these same Congressional Democrats non-reception of General Petraeus. Again, Kaplan explained, “During General Petraeus's visit to Washington last week, for example, House Democrats at first denied the Iraq commander an opportunity to brief them, citing "scheduling conflicts." And, when he finally did brief Congress, the evidence of progress that Petraeus was expected to present was dismissed before he even offered it. "He's the commander," Senator Carl Levin reasoned. "We always know that commanders are optimistic about their policies." The joke here, of course, is that Levin and his colleagues were not so long ago denouncing the Bush administration -- and rightly so -- for the sin of disparaging military expertise.”
Stranger still, is the fact that most of these Congressional Dems voted to confirm General Petraeus, who endorsed the surge, thus confirming Petraeus was, in effect, supporting the surge.
Even the Washington posts’ David Broder has taken Harry Reid to task for undermining his own plan for a diplomatic solution to Iraq.
"Instead of reinforcing the important proposition ... that a military strategy for Iraq is necessary but not sufficient to solve the myriad political problems of that country, Reid has mistakenly argued that the military effort is lost but a diplomatic-political strategy can succeed." Nor is this the only reason to doubt the reasoning behind Reid's "diplomatic surge." To begin with, even if they were inclined to assist the American cause in Iraq, neither Iran nor Syria have much, if any, sway over Al Qaeda. Moreover, the violence in Iraq has its own, wholly internal logic. In fact, the one brand of diplomacy that truly matters in Iraq--the U.S. Army's tribal diplomacy, which accounts for the recent turn-around in Anbar Province--is precisely the mission that Reid's demand for a skeleton force would shut down.”
Lawrence Kaplan calls them “illiterate on Iraq,” and Broder calls Reid’s basic common sense into question.
Does it get any better and yet, at the same time, scarier than that?!
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w070430&s=kaplan050107
