Pelosi insults troops, our intelligence on surge

Abe Greenwald:

In an interview yesterday with the San Francisco Chronicle, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi claimed the U.S. troop surge failed to accomplish its goal. She then partially credited the success of the troop surge to “the goodwill of the Iranians,” claiming that they were responsible for ending violence in the southern city of Basra.

Asked if she saw any evidence of the surge’s positive impact on her May 17 trip to Iraq she responded:

Well, the purpose of the surge was to provide a secure space, a time for the political change to occur to accomplish the reconciliation. That didn’t happen. Whatever the military success, and progress that may have been made, the surge didn’t accomplish its goal. And some of the success of the surge is that the goodwill of the Iranians-they decided in Basra when the fighting would end, they negotiated that cessation of hostilities-the Iranians.

This is an inexcusable slander. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki brought the Sadrists militias to their knees in a month-long battle that enabled Iraq’s largest Sunni bloc to rejoin the government. Furthermore, when Pelosi met with Prime Minister al-Maliki in Mosul she sang quite a different tune. She had “welcomed Iraq’s progress in passing a budget as well as oil legislation, and a bill paving the way for the provincial elections in the fall that are expected to more equitably redistribute power among local officials,” and stated, “We’re assured the elections will happen here, they will be transparent, they will be inclusive and they will take Iraq closer to the reconciliation we all want it to have.”

...

This woman is a disgrace. She is deeply in denial about the progress our troops and the Iraqis have accomplished. To suggest that Iran has been helpful while they are supplying weapons to kill our troops is beyond outrageous. Ace expresses his own outrage at Pelosi position.

The Belmont Club says Iran is having some internal stress. "... If Iran begins to break down then it will be abundantly clear that Pelosi's -- and indeed Obama's -- diplomatic strategy in the region is fundamentally flawed. There is no point to going, hat in hand, to a regime that is itself on the way out. It would be like dealing with a corpse...."

Pelosi may be making a play for a deal with Iran, because the Democrats initial objective of losing to al Qaeda has been thwarted by the success of the surge. They still have a strange desperation for failure in Iraq which they apparently need to validate their opposition to the war. A victory is much more troublesome for them.