Madame Speaker? One first shy of where Nancy Pelosi must have wanted to be. The majority party's doyenne traveled to Near Eastern capitals this last week, and for that had to at least try on the title of Madame Emissary.
While packing, Mme. needed to untangle herself from controversy over her short tour. The Bush administration didn't want Pelosi to go to Syria because, explained a representative, "to have high-level U.S. officials going there to have photo opportunities that [Syrian dictator Bashar] Assad then exploits" dragged American foreign policy in a direction the White House considered backwards. The speaker thought this was unfair. "It's interesting because three of our colleagues, who are all Republicans, were in Syria yesterday and I didn't hear the White House speaking out about that."
True, members of both parties from a Congress restless in the president's second term have pilgrimaged, several of them stopping in Damascus to patronize the man whose totalitarian regime endures seven years after the death of its founder, resisting the Westerly democratist push. Pelosi, who is politicking all the time, should know why she was singled out. Straying legislators have received the administration's open disapproval, including Republican Arlen Specter when he, in December, accompanied three Democrats. But as the frequency of these trips increased so did the profile of those taking them. Ranking senatorial committee membership doesn't compare to tertiary executive standing. The Damascene audience of three congressmen preceding the speaker might be identified as Who?, Who? and Who?, whereas one familiar with just a dozen Washington names probably knows Nancy Pelosi.
Once overseas, the emissary practiced grandma diplomacy. She was photographed wearing a native bonnet; then shaking hands with a nice, smiling man who lives in the watchtower of a police state. And then she misspoke to a degree of international incidence, with an artlessness that almost charmed. Talks with the nice, smiling man "enabled us to communicate a message from Prime Minister Olmert that Israel was ready to engage in peace talks." Mr. Olmert issued a correction to the world, insofar as Israel was waiting for Bashar Assad to enjoin Syria's terrorism, thus far from ready.
Some press accounts did not report this contradiction. Others assuaged Syria's blameworthiness by placing it at the end of an accusation of Bush's. "The White House accuses," but, you know, maybe not rightly. That Damascus extrudes fascism, of course, wouldn't be an assertion but an acknowledgment of asseverated fact, as if the weatherman were to accuse stratus clouds of supporting rain.
Propitious were two news items coming from Iraqi Kurdistan in the same week: the first, by Patrick Lasswell, was about an old torture facility in Suliamaniya known as "The Red Building"; and the second, a dispatch from correspondent Michael Totten, among the Peshmerga, on Kurdish soldiery. The Assad state regularly tramples its populating Kurds, and as Pelosi's itinerary skipped Baghdad, the speaker's magniloquent determination that "the road to Damascus is a road to peace" was a peculiar and consequential choice for recognition.
A murmur about the illegality of the tour has gone up, and will probably quietly go back down. Since the average resident of San Francisco is agog over any insult to Washington, and something near a national majority shrug their shoulders at the why and when of deploying consuls, the speaker will be, after this trip, neither unelectable nor irrepatriable. Still, in her peremptory summons to an American ally, and her silence on the crucial provinces in northern Iraq, Nancy Pelosi made obvious the loyalties that would be most highly valued, two years from now, by a Democratic president.