Speaker Pelosi has spoken again, demanding her right to save Iran from an American attack.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President George W. Bush must seek congressional approval before taking any military action in Iran, unless Tehran attacks the United States first, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Sunday.
“We don’t believe that any authorities that the president has would give him the ability to go in without an act of Congress,” Pelosi told ABC’s “This Week” program.
“Any president, if we are attacked, if our country is attacked has — even under the War Powers Act — very strong powers to go after that country. But short of that, he must come to the Congress…”
If you parse it the way a lawyer would, Pelosi seems to be talking about invasion of Iran, not bombing. In the first graph she is talking about “military action in Iran,” and in the second graph it’s “go in.” I suspect she didn’t intend that, and that she’d oppose bombing as well as invasion.
She’s got a strong opinion on war with Iran, but she doesn’t know very much. Anyone in her position who says that the president can act if “we are attacked” by Iran, in a tone of voice that indicates she doesn’t know that Iran has attacked us repeatedly for nearly thirty years, should be sent to a reeducation camp. She can watch videos of the Tehran Embassy seizure, the East African Embassy bombings, the Khobar Towers attack, and other such events, up to and including the hundreds of Americans killed in Iraq by Iranian weapons, Iranian killers, and Iranian-trained terrorists.
She seems to understand, however vaguely, that there have been Iranian attacks in Iraq, since she goes out of her way to say that “whatever Iran’s impact is on our troops in Iraq should be dealt with in Iraq,”
In other words, Iran always gets the first shot, and if they do it in Iraq, we can’t go after Iran at all, only after their agents and proxies on Iraqi soil.
Still, at least we get to respond, albeit in a constrained form, to attacks on our troops. She doesn’t have a word to say about the most commonly invoked scenario, namely an attack against Israel. I think Israeli officials, and Americans who think that the Democrats are even friendlier to Israel than the Republicans, might ask themselves whether Pelosi deliberately excluded an Iranian attack against Israel as cause for an American military response, or whether that, too, was simply an oversight.