Investor's Business Daily, February 27th, 2007
Politics: Nancy Pelosi has decided the next best thing to leaving Iraq is for Democrats to micromanage our forces there. As her broken promises on reforming Congress proved, the speaker cannot be trusted.
Pelosi announced this week that she was inclined to back a plan by Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to repeal Congress' post-9/11 Iraq War authorization and replace it with a measure restricting the role of U.S. forces there.
Congress' endorsement of our troops' mission in Iraq should be "more focused," Pelosi told reporters. And of legislation proposed by crony John Murtha, chairman of the House appropriations defense subcommittee, that would attach strings to nearly $100 billion for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pelosi also said comically: "I don't see them as conditions to our funding."
Whatever the speaker says she doesn't see, Democrats want a congressional prohibition on troop activities going beyond fighting al-Qaida, training the Iraqis, guarding the border and packing their bags for a premature return home. Murtha also disingenuously claims he wants our troops trained before they see battle -- a crass means of delaying new troop deployments.
It's all very clever politically. If President Bush's new Iraq strategy turns things around, Pelosi & Co. can date it to the onset of their meddling and claim credit. What these anti-war Democrats have made it clear they really want, however, is to see this president blamed for a U.S. military defeat. Tying the hands of commanders in Iraq is a sure way to accelerate such an outcome.
Bush is wise to the Democrats' motives. Addressing governors Monday, he promised to fight Congress' intrusions and "make sure those troops who are in harm's way have the resources and that ... our commanders have the flexibility necessary to execute the plan that we've laid out."
Low chicanery has come to be expected from the new speaker. As Washington's Politico Web site noted this week, Pelosi's promises of congressional reform have become a joke less than eight weeks into the 110th Congress. Her much-touted "five-day workweek" has happened once so far, Republicans have only one time been allowed to vote on a measure of their own, and her "100 hours" agenda took two weeks to complete.
Moreover, what Pelosi pledged would be "the most ethical Congress in history" has Rep. William Jefferson, found last year with $90,000 in alleged bribes hidden in his freezer, sitting on the House Homeland Security Committee, courtesy of the speaker.
Under normal circumstances, Jefferson would not qualify for a low-level security clearance. Yet Pelosi placed him on a congressional panel with the freedom to peruse our most sensitive secrets.
When Bush solemnly swore to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, little did he know that one of those domestic enemies would be armed with a gavel.
Copyright 2007 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
