Nancy Pelosi’s “Failure” Mantra

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said twice Sunday that Iraq “is a failure,” adding that President Bush’s troop surge has “not produced the desired effect.”

“The purpose of the surge was to create a secure time for the government of Iraq to make the political change to bring reconciliation to Iraq,” Pelosi said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “They have not done that.”

Yeah, the ‘desired effect’ was total victory for Islamofascism and defeat of U.S. forces.

The speaker hastened to add: “The troops have succeeded, God bless them.”

Much to your dismay, Pelosi.

……Anchor Wolf Blitzer asked: “Are you not worried, though, that all the gains that have been achieved over the past year might be lost?”

“There haven’t been gains, Wolf,” the speaker replied. “The gains have not produced the desired effect, which is the reconciliation of Iraq. This is a failure. This is a failure. The troops have succeeded, God bless them. We owe them the greatest debt of gratitude for their sacrifice, their patriotism, and for their courage and to their families as well.

Didja get that? “Blinky” Pelosi can’t even get her defeatest story straight. She claims ‘failure’, yet in the same fetid breath she thanks us for our success.

“But they deserve better than the policy of a war without end, a war that could be 20 years or longer. And Secretary Gates just testified in the last 24 hours to Congress that this next year in Iraq and Afghanistan are going to cost $170 billion.

It would’ve been cheaper to use a couple of neutron bombs, but hey, they wouldn’t listen to me.

We deserved better leadership than what we were saddled with between 1992 and 2000. FIVE terrorist attacks happened under Bubba’s watch; Khobar Towers, USS Cole, the U.S. Embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania, and the first  World Trade center attack in 1993. His response? He wagged the dog in Mogadishu and Bosnia. He was too busy getting re-election cash from Bejiing and blow jobs from Monica to care about national security.

We also deserve better than mealy-mouthed leftwing democrats calling us “mercenaries” and “Nazi’s”, and telling us that they don’t think the sacrifice of the fallen in this war was “worth it”. We know more than anyone about how sacrificing for democracy works, having defended it for over 230 years.

“Afghanistan is not settled because the president took his eye off the ball and took the full attention that should have been in Afghanistan, and shifted some of that to Iraq, a war without end, without a plan, without a reason to go in, without a plan to win, without a strategy to leave. This is a disaster … we cannot perpetuate.”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8422.html

Well let’s see now, al Qadea and the Taliban have gotten their asses royally kicked in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were 3000  reasons to go in and kill them. The plan is working. We’ve won. When Baghdad and Kabul are ready to take the reins, we’ll be through.

The Democratic wing of Al Qaeda just can’t let go of their defeatist ambitions. On the other hand, the Al Qaeda in Iraq already know they’re beaten to a pulp:

Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an “extraordinary crisis”. Last year’s mass defection of ordinary Sunnis from al-Qaeda to the US military “created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight”. The terrorist group’s security structure suffered “total collapse”.

These are the words not of al-Qaeda’s enemies but of one of its own leaders in Anbar province — once the group’s stronghold. They were set down last summer in a 39-page letter seized during a US raid on an al-Qaeda base near Samarra in November.

The US military released extracts from that letter yesterday along with a second seized in another November raid that is almost as startling.

That second document is a bitter 16-page testament written last October by a local al-Qaeda leader near Balad, north of Baghdad. “I am Abu-Tariq, emir of the al-Layin and al-Mashahdah sector,” the author begins. He goes on to describe how his force of 600 shrank to fewer than 20.

“We were mistreated, cheated and betrayed by some of our brothers,” he says. “Those people were nothing but hypocrites, liars and traitors and were waiting for the right moment to switch sides with whoever pays them most.”

Assuming the two documents are authentic — and the US military insists that they are — they provide a rare insight into an organisation thrown into turmoil by the rise of the Awakening movement. More than 80,000 Sunnis have joined the tribal groups of “concerned local citizens” [CLCs] that have helped to eject al-Qaeda from swaths of western and northern Iraq, including much of Baghdad.

US intelligence officials cautioned, however, that the documents were snapshots of two small areas and that al-Qaeda was far from a spent force.

……The Anbar letter conceded that the “crusaders” — Americans — had gained the upper hand by persuading ordinary Sunnis that al-Qaeda was responsible for their suffering and by exploiting their poverty to entice them into the security forces.
Al-Qaeda’s “Islamic State of Iraq is faced with an extraordinary crisis, especially in al-Anbar”, the unnamed emir admitted.

In an apparent reference to al-Qaeda’s brutal tactics, he said of the Americans and their Sunni allies: “We helped them to unite against us . . . The Americans and the apostates launched their campaigns against us and we found ourselves in a circle not being able to move, organise or conduct our operations.”

He said of the loss of Anbar province: “This created weakness and psychological defeat. This also created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight.

The morale of the fighters went down . . . There was a total collapse in the security structure of the organisation.” The emir complained that the supply of foreign fighters had dwindled and that they found it increasingly hard to operate inside Iraq because they could not blend in. Foreign suicide bombers determined to kill “not less than 20 or 30 infidels” grew disillusioned because they were kept hanging about and only given small operations. Some gave up and went home.

Finally the emir recommended rewards for killing apostates, using doctors to kill infidels and offering gifts to tribal leaders. He said al-Qaeda’s fighters should be sent to more promising areas such as Diyala province or Baghdad — which is exactly what happened.

Rear-Admiral Gregory Smith, the US military spokesman in Baghdad, called Abu-Tariq’s testament a “woe-is-me kind of document”. It calls the Sunnis who switched sides a “cancer in the body of al-Jihad movement”, and declares: “We should have no mercy on them.”

The author lists those who have made off with al-Qaeda weapons or money, describes the group’s arsenal, including C5 rockets, which are used against helicopters, and records the fate of the battalions under his command.

Most of the first battalion’s fighters “betrayed us and joined al-Sahwah [the Awakening]”, he says. The leader of the second ran away and all but two of its 300 fighters joined the Awakening. The activities of the third were “frozen due to their present conditions”. Of the fourth he writes: “Most of its members are scoundrels, sectarians, non-believers”.

He lists 38 people still working for him but beside five names he has written comments like “We have not seen him for twenty days” or “left us a week ago”. He concludes, wistfully: “And that is the number of fighters left in my sector.”

Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article3346386.ece

Gee, the beleaguered Abu-Tariq sounds so much like Pelosi, it’s downright scary.