Pelosi Says She Expected Republicans to Back Iraq Withdrawal

I kid you not. According to Congressional Quarterly,

Pelosi Says She Miscalculated GOP Determination on Iraq

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., admitted Thursday that she had underestimated the willingness of Republicans to stand behind President Bush’s Iraq policy despite the drubbing the GOP took in the polls in 2006.

“The assumption I made was that the Republicans would soon see the light,” she said. Instead, the minority stuck to the president’s war policy in the face of unrelenting pressure from congressional Democrats and powerful lobbying campaigns by anti-war groups.

Bush has consistently refused to accept any limitations on his authority to direct military operations in Iraq, or on funds destined for the war effort. Democrats have been unable to muster enough votes to force him to accept a timetable for withdrawal of combat troops or a change in their mission in Iraq.

“That was a revelation to me, because I felt the American peoples’ voices were so strong and still are in this regard that I hoped that with some compromise and reaching out there might be some change in direction,” Pelosi said. “But they are sticking with the president on this.”

Democrats thus are ending their first year in power without producing the major Iraq policy change that had been a major selling point to voters in 2006.

“The grassroots are justifiably disappointed and I am too that we have not done more to end this war,” Pelosi said.

Republicans say the Democrats’ effort to force a withdrawal from Iraq has run out of steam because of the success of this year’s “surge” strategy of sending in some 30,000 extra U.S. combat troops to help quell violence. They point to the decline in Iraqi and American casualties as proof the new strategy is working and say it should be allowed to continue to work.

So, with Pelosi having discovered a year late who the Republicans are, and admitted that she actually believed insanely that they would oppose their "war president," will she now admit that there is only one power available to her, only one way she can end the occupation of Iraq? Will she allow impeachment proceedings to begin?

Or will she buy into the surge-is-working nonsense? The surge was supposed to create political solutions and allow withdrawal. It has not solved anything in Iraqi puppet politics, and it is now being used as justification for not withdrawing. Violence is not down in the ways claimed. Even the claims of reduced violence are claims of massive violence reduced from even higher levels. Nothing has been reconstructed. The Iraqi people want the US troops out, and nobody has claimed Iraqis view the "surge" as a success. Iraqis returning home are mostly doing so because they have no choice. They are returning to a disaster area, where many have been killed or imprisoned, and the rest segregated. They are returning to a violent world, and their return will increase the violence. The underlying cause is the presence of a hated foreign occupation funded by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.