Beats Hoping We'll Lose

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lashed out at Republicans on Thursday, saying they want the Iraq war to drag on and are ignoring the public's priorities.

"They like this war. They want this war to continue," Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters. She expressed frustration over Republicans' ability to force majority Democrats to yield ground on taxes, spending, energy, war spending and other matters.

Pelosi is a moron. I'd say the same thing if she were a Republican. It does the Republicans no good to see the war continue unless continuing it means we win. There is an excellent chance Republicans will lose this election because of the war. They lost the last one.

On the other hand, it makes me sick when I read some Democrat saying "So and so democrat is going to be really disappointed to see that we are winning the war in Iraq." You can debate whether we should be in Iraq, but there should be no debate about winning/losing. Losing doesn't "show" the Republicans or the President anything. It hurts our troops, it hurts our country and it hurts the country we are fighting in.

Pelosi, who opposed the U.S.-led invasion from the start, said the war was "a catastrophic mistake."

Fair enough. Far more reasonable people have opposed this war.

This next one is a bit hard to swallow:

Despite being forced to make concessions on multiple fronts, Pelosi said Democrats have been fiscally responsible and attuned to the public's concerns. As a result, she said, voters will reward Democrats in next year's presidential and congressional elections.

No voter would dare accuse either side of the aisle of being fiscally responsible or being attuned to the public's concerns (for a good example, see immigration. It satifies both categories).

In response, House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said in statement: "Republicans have stood on principle to protect current and future generations of Americans, whether it polled well or not. The success our troops are having in Iraq today is proof positive that our stance was the right one."

Good response although (in fairness) if the Republicans had pulled out when Iraq began polling badly, it would have doomed them for the next 15 years. Their only hope was to stay in the game and hope things turned around. I'd like to credit their principles, but I suspect it was a mixed bag.

Update:

Hitchens has a characteristically superb article on the topic of losing in Iraq.

How can so many people watch this as if they were spectators, handicapping and rating the successes and failures from some imagined position of neutrality? Do they suppose that a defeat in Iraq would be a defeat only for the Bush administration? The United States is awash in human rights groups, feminist organizations, ecological foundations, and committees for the rights of minorities. How come there is not a huge voluntary effort to help and to publicize the efforts to find the hundreds of thousands of "missing" Iraqis, to support Iraqi women's battle against fundamentalists, to assist in the recuperation of the marsh Arab wetlands, and to underwrite the struggle of the Kurds, the largest stateless people in the Middle East? Is Abu Ghraib really the only subject that interests our humanitarians?

And another on the apparent turn of events in Iraq:

As I began by saying, I am not at all certain that any of this apparently good news is really genuine or will be really lasting. However, I am quite sure both that it could be true and that it would be wonderful if it were to be true. What worries me about the reaction of liberals and Democrats is not the skepticism, which is pardonable, but the dank and sinister impression they give that the worse the tidings, the better they would be pleased. The latter mentality isn't pardonable and ought not to be pardoned, either.