While looking for something unrelated, I stumbled on some flack from bloggers about my column last week on the surge. Apparently I’m deluded for having said “And, of course, Kerry, Pelosi and other Democrats were in favor of more troops before they were against it.” Kevin Drum, for whom I have a lot of respect, says it’s a “canard.” Meanwhile, something called the Carpetbagger report chimes in making similar objections (I particularly like it when bloggers I’m barely aware exist claim it’s a big concession for them to respond to me).

Anyway, let’s stick with Drum who is a serious guy. Much of his case seems to be dependent on the fact that Pelosi Kerry & Others aren’t for a surge now. Since that’s obviously my point, too, I take him to mean they were never for surging troops except in a shoulda-coulda-woulda Monday morning quarterback kind of way. Well, that’s hard to square with Nancy Pelosi’s comments on Meet the Press in 2004:

MR. RUSSERT: What would you do, what would you do in Iraq today right now?
REP. PELOSI: What I would do is and what I think our country must do in Iraq is take an assessment of where we are. And there has to be a leveling with the American people and with the Congress of the United States as to what is really actually happening there. It’s very hard to say what you would do. We need more troops on the ground. General…
MR. RUSSERT: American troops if necessary?
REP. PELOSI: …General Shinseki said this from the start, when you make an appraisal about whether you’re going to war, you have to know what you need.
MR. RUSSERT: So you would put more American troops on the ground?
REP. PELOSI: What I’m saying to you, that we need more troops on the ground. I think it would be better if we could get them to be not American, that we could appeal to our European allies, NATO. I agree with Senator Kerry in that respect to come…
MR. RUSSERT: But if they say no, if they say no, would you put more American troops on the ground?
REP. PELOSI: Clear and present danger facing the United States is terrorism. We have to solidify, we have to stabilize the situation in Iraq. As secretary of state has said, “You break it, you own it.” We have a responsibility now in Iraq there. And we have to get more troops on the ground. But when General Shinseki said we need 300,000 troops, Secretary Wolfowitz said “wildly off the mark,” because they knew a commitment of 300,000 troops would not be acceptable to the American people. So they went in with false assumptions about rose petals, not rocket-propelled grenades, and we’re in this fix that we’re in now.
MR. RUSSERT: Well, let’s assume all that is wrong. In order to stabilize the situation, NATO has said they have no troops for Iraq, the French, the Germans and Russians saying no.
REP. PELOSI: We have to send…
MR. RUSSERT: Would you send more American troops in order to stabilize the situation?
REP. PELOSI: Yes….

As for John Kerry, who was constantly invoking General Shinseki as the voice of God on troop numbers and Iraq, said on the Today show on June 29, 2005: “We don’t have enough troops in Iraq.”

And here he is on Meet The Press in 2004:

MR. RUSSERT: So if Iraq is not secure, how can you possibly say the U.N. and NATO are going to come to our rescue when they don’t have the troops or the interest of going in there?
SEN. KERRY: Tim, that is the dilemma. That is exactly the quandary that President Bush and this administration have put the United States of America in. And the tragedy is that there were three great opportunities for this administration to make it otherwise. Opportunity number one was when we voted and when the president broke his promise to build a legitimate coalition by being patient with the U.N. inspection process. Opportunity number two was when the statue fell in Baghdad and Kofi Annan invited the United States to come to the table and offered help and we rejected it. And opportunity number three was when this president went to the U.N. last fall and once again did not invite people, didn’t even acknowledge the kind of difficulties we were in that might have elicited some sympathy from other people.
Now, here we are. I believe the following very deeply. Number one, we cannot fail. I’ve said that many times. And if it requires more troops in order to create the stability that eliminates the chaos, that can provide the groundwork for other countries, that’s what we have to do.
MR. RUSSERT: How do you define failure?
SEN. KERRY: Well, I think failure is the lack of a stable Iraq. I think a failed state in Iraq is failure.
MR. RUSSERT: Islamic regime similar to Iran would be acceptable?
SEN. KERRY: You could even go further than what I just said and suggest that if we are stuck for a long period of time in a quagmire where young Americans are dying without a sense of that being able to be achieved, I think most Americans will decide that’s failure.

Now, as for the phrasing “and other Democrats.” I assume I’m allowed to say that without being charged with saying “and all other Democrats.” Of course not all Democrats favored more troops. I never said any such thing nor would I. I have heard of Dennis Kucinich for example. But many did use this talking point when it worked against Bush, then when Bush favored a surge, they didn’t. There may be good answers for why they’ve changed positions. I can imagine several possible ones. But that hardly means anything I wrote was incorrect or unfair.

Update: This passage from Rich’s surge column seems relevant:

Every Senate Democrat with presidential aspirations voted to authorize the war, mostly because they feared getting on the wrong side politically of what looked like would be a popular, successful war to topple Saddam Hussein. The same bad faith has sent Democrats and liberal commentators searching for muscular military measures to favor in theory.
It once was a staple of Democratic criticism of the Bush administration’s management of the Iraq war that it hadn’t dedicated enough troops to stabilize the country. John Kerry: “We don’t have enough troops (there).” Joe Biden: “There’s not enough force on the ground now to mount a real counterinsurgency.” That was before Bush seemed on the verge of actually proposing more troops. Now Democrats support more troops — but only for Afghanistan.

Update II: From a reader:

Jonah,
There’s more recent examples. Harry Reid was for more troops as
late as 12/17/06. Now he’s opposed. Sylvester Reyes called
specifically for 20-30k troops in late November or early December.
Now he’s opposed too. For what other reasons other than politics can
these two have changed their tune in such short order?

Update III: As several readers pointed out to me, I read too fast. Drum says “In fact, if by “not long ago” Goldberg means sometime in the past year, then he’d be hard pressed to find more than a handful of Democrats — Pelosi and Kerry certainly not among them — who have even come close to suggesting we send more troops to Iraq.”

My apologies for missing this, though I hardly see why Drum gets to declare the last year as the standard. It’s hardly as if I said “in the last year.” Still, I could have said it and been accurate in the cases of the Senate majority leader and Pelosi’s pick for Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee as indicated in the email above.