NANCY PELOSI WAS the featured guest on Face the Nation; all 30 minutes of the show were dedicated to the new speaker of the House. As might be expected, there were some real gems from the California Democrat. She said that President Bush will no longer have a blank check in Iraq, but offered nothing in the way of what military planners refer to as a “strategy.” “If the president chooses to escalate the war,” she told Bob Schieffer, “in his budget request, we want to see a distinction between what is there to support the troops who are there now. The American people and the Congress support those troops. We will not abandon them. But if the president wants to add to this mission, he is going to have to justify it.” She then followed this up by saying “There is complete chaos now. For three and a half years, we’ve been on a course of action that has taken us in the wrong direction. We’ve just passed the 3,000 mark of lives lost in Iraq. How much longer can we sustain an effort where there is no plan, where there is no plan to get the job done? The military has performed excellently, but there is no political and diplomatic plan to get the job done.”
Instead of offering a Democratic plan for victory, the new speaker suggested that the military should “redeploy.” Pelosi never vocalizes what the consequences of redeployment would be, but Lindsey Graham spelled it out on Meet the Press: “If Iraq fails and you have open civil war, it creates a regional conflict that would follow us for decades.” Brent Scowcroft went a little further on This Week: “The other aspect of this whole thing is that we sort of treat Iraq as well, ‘if we get it, ok, if we don’t, we’ll just leave. It’s not that easy, because we will be seen as abandoning a region, abandoning our friends, abandoning the people who have put their faith in us.” Not to mention the whole “ethnic cleansing” thing that would almost assuredly occur if we pulled out in four to six months as Pelosi would–on that, and the other potential consequences of defeat, read Weekly Standard contributing editor Reuel Marc Gerecht’s most recent piece.
As previously mentioned, Brent Scowcroft was a guest on This Week, and spoke on the goals that would need to be accompanied by a surge of troops into Iraq. “If there is a specific mission that they can accomplish, and for a specific period, then it’s worthwhile. . . . there is ethnic cleansing going on in Baghdad, if that can be stopped by a specific number of troops in a specific period of time, that would be demonstrable improvement.”
In the roundtable, George Will laid out the political risks involved in the upcoming debate on Iraq. “The one point of agreement in this town is that you can’t go forward the way we’ve been going forward,” he began, adding “the president’s making a huge gamble that this will make a difference in Baghdad, and that if we subdue Baghdad it will not reduce the incentive of the Shiite government to move toward reconciliation. The opponents of the surge are making a huge gamble that a civil war with genocidal stakes will not break out if we begin to withdraw.” Cokie Roberts commented on the political gamble involved in the forthcoming economic discussions, and whether or not taxes would be raised to reduce the deficit: “No one has ever made political gain by bringing down the deficit. That is just not the way to go if you’re interested in the politics of it.”
Meet the Press featured senators Joe Biden and Lindsey Graham. The last item first: Joe Biden wound up the show by declaring his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president. Undoubtedly, this will mark the third unsuccessful run for president by the senator from the great state of Delaware.
Graham tried to provide a modicum of perspective to the Iraq debate, saying “the biggest mistake we could make as a nation is to listen to Pelosi and Reid doctrine of withdrawing without wondering what happens when we leave. . . . I understand it’s not popular, but this war is not about the moment, it’s about the next decade and the decade to follow.” He then pressed Biden about the Democratic impulse to slink out of Iraq, and Biden replied a little testily: “But until we put the right combat power in place with the Iraqis, we will never have a political solution. And I ask my friend Joe Biden, the letter from Pelosi and Reid of leaving in four to six months, do you agree with that?” “I do not,” said Biden. “This is a red herring. Here’s the deal: 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 troops is not enough. Let’s get real here.” Of course this is not at all a red herring since the leadership of his own party very explicitly called for the troops to be pulled out in a jointly written letter to the president.
On Fox News Sunday, new Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took on the Democratic commitment to “paygo,” or finding revenue for any new expenditure without increasing the deficit. “What paygo really means is, you’re going to have a tax increase. Most Republicans are not going to support the paygo provision, it almost guarantees that the majority, if it enacts it, will try and raise taxes.” In the panel, Fred Barnes compared Bush to the Atlantic‘s most influential American: “The president is not doing what his commanders on the ground have urged mainly because their policy has failed. Baghdad is not secure, it is the center of great chaos and turmoil and violence in Iraq. So he’s done what Abraham Lincoln did; when your commanders are not winning, you bring in new commanders. And after all he is the commander in chief.” Bill Kristol laid out the options in Iraq, saying “Still, the question is: Is it in our national interest to lose this war in Iraq. Really, what this is about is, quote, bringing the war to a close, but the war is not going to be brought to a close. If we withdraw, the war is going to get worse. More Iraqis are going to be killed. Does anyone doubt that?” And Juan Williams warned that the American public would not stand for an increased presence in Iraq, saying “if you’re talking about American political support for an extended, you say years . . . you must remember that it’s at most 18 percent of the American people support the surge for even a short amount of time.”
Sonny Bunch is assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
