Democrats Follow Mandate for More Troops in Iraq

Was the 2006 election a resounding call to increase the number of troops in Iraq?

According to the progressive polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, "By a 54-39 percent margin, voters favor setting a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq."

Yet Nancy Pelosi's choice to head up the House Intelligence Committee, Texas Democrat Silvestre Reyes, who voted against the Iraq war in 2002, now tells Newsweek he would support an increase of troops in Iraq by 20,000-30,000: "We have to consider the need for additional troops to be in Iraq, to take out the militias and stabilize Iraq … We certainly can’t leave Iraq and run the risk that it becomes [like] Afghanistan."

To which Newsweek added the paraphrase explaining he means like Afghanistan "was before the 2001 invasion by the United States," and not the mess it continues to be in today.

It's bad enough that some Democrats claim the election was a call for the redeployment of troops to Northern Iraq, Afghanistan or other nearby countries. Apparently as the democratic (small "d") furvor of the election fades, the Democrats (big "D") are once again easing into their more comfortable position of selling out their base and ditching the peaceniks for their own imperial strategies.

We still have a lot of work to do.