Democratic Leadership is failing miserably on Iraq. Rahm appears to finally, and fully get the problem:
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If he feels this way, he has the leverage to push.
Mr. Speaker, the previous days have offered a series of reports on conditions in Iraq.
And these reports have been consistent: Iraq remains dangerous and unstable, and political progress is virtually non-existent.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The President’s escalation was supposed to give the Iraqi government and the ethnic groups the room they needed to make political progress. That progress simply has not happened.
So now, after four and a half years, billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and countless new slogans, the Bush Administration is just giving us the status quo light.
Instead of a new strategy for Iraq, the Bush Administration is cherry-picking the data to support their political objectives and preparing a report that will offer another defense of the President’s strategy.
We don’t need a report that wins the Nobel Prize for creative statistics or the Pulitzer for fiction. Americans are demanding the facts, an end to this open-ended commitment, a surge on the political and diplomatic front. In short, the American people want a new direction in Iraq.