Nancy Pelosi is either clueless or beyond cynical, but in either case her strategy will ultimately lead to her failure.  In 2006, thanks to the blunders of Karl Rove, the American electorate was both pissed off about Iraq and tired of Bush.  Pelosi's strategy is to constantly remind the American electorate of those two facts.

Karl's first failure was choosing to sell the war in Iraq with a convenient truth that turned out to be false.  We should be in Iraq doing exactly what we are doing, but the case is very complicated and has nothing to do with WMD.  Rove decided the American public was too dumb or too selfish to get the real reason, so he decided to use fear instead.  If Bush had made the real case, we would have expected the current state of affairs and been willing to sustain those sacrifices for the ultimate goal.

The Baker Policy Institute is home to the political science department of Rice University in Houston, Texas.  Two faculty, Rick Stoll and Cliff Morgan, have produced groundbreaking work in the field of international relations.  This academic research shows that there is only one factor so universally applicable in the study of war that it can be called a "law" rather than a theory.  This one fact is, true democracies do not fight each other.  In order to have war, you must have dictatorship (fascist or socialist) or anarchy on at least one side.  The implication is that a world made up of true democracies would have no war.

Rick Stoll and Cliff Morgan have the ear of James Baker.  Baker has the ear of George 1.  George 1 has the ear of George 2.  George 2 thinks creating peace in the middle east would be a greater accomplishment that Ronald Reagan's legacy of democratizing Eastern Europe.  So before 9/11, George 2 was already thinking about ways to democratize the Arab world.  The problem with this thinking is that it fails to account for the contextual differences between Eastern Europe and the Middle East.  Prior to the Soviet era, Easter Europe enjoyed a short but significant exposure to the institutions that provide the foundations for democracy.  Unfortunately, prior to Saddam, Iraq was ruled by a different henchman who used the same cult of personality methods and violent oppression to hold power.  Use the experience of Olympic athletes as a metaphor to understand these differences.  When a Romanian Olympian failed, they lost their nice apartment and spent the rest of their days working in a shoe factory.  When an Iraqi Olympian failed, they lost their left hand and their sister was gang raped by secret police.  This produces a different psychology that makes democracy building a little more challenging.  And we knew this before we started.  And it's still worth the sacrifice.  But Karl was either too lazy or too inadequate to make this case to the country.

So we went in to Iraq on the premise that they posed a direct threat in the form of WMD, instead of the premise that the country posed one of many barriers to stable and peaceful coexistance on the planet.  George 2's challenge over the next two years is to educate the country about international relations.  I suggest he bypass Karl and go straight to the source.  Get Rick Stoll and Cliff Morgan to start writing his speeches.  Once Iraq and Afghanistan have stable democracies capable of protecting themselves within and without, our attention will necessarily move to Syria and Iran.  Hopefully, we can engage some assistance from other developed countries to get there.  In the mean time, Bush cannot count on any support from Pelosi's congress unless he comes clean about the real strategy.

In addition to keeping Iraq in the headlines, Pelosi's '08 strategy is to remind everyone that Bush is an idiot.  People definitely voted against Bush in '06, but he's not on the ballot in '08.  The only way the Democrat's current strategy of beating up on Bush will make sense is if the Christian right monopolizes the Republic primary process again and sends another born again Bush copy into the general election.  Having God on our side is great as an ace up the sleeve, but when it becomes a central tenet of foreign policy strategy we are in big trouble.  We need a President who is comfortable with his faith in God, but has faith in rationality when making policy decisions.

So Nancy will keep getting meaningless Iraq resolutions on C-Span and take every opportunity to get Bush commenting on his policies.  If Bush, or one of the Republican nominees, makes the true case for being in the Middle East, then the natural progress of the campaign will take attention off the incumbent president.  Candidates for Congress in '08 will get to show their constituents what a waste of time Pelosi's congress really was and she will lose the House.