The ISG report

Here it is (PDF).

Update: Pelosi's statement (via email):

"The bipartisan Iraq Study Group has concluded that the President's Iraq policy has failed and must be changed.  As the November elections clearly demonstrated, that is an assessment shared by the American people.

"Months ago, House and Senate Democratic leaders suggested to the President that he implement one of the Study Group's chief recommendations - to change the primary mission of U.S. troops in Iraq from combat to training and support, which would enable the redeployment of U.S. forces to begin.  Now that the Study Group has endorsed this proposal, I hope that the President will recognize that he must take our policy in Iraq in a new direction.

"If the President is serious about the need for change in Iraq, he will find Democrats ready to work with him in a bipartisan fashion to find a way to end the war as quickly as possible.  We are committed to ensuring that the ideas of the Iraq Study Group, as well as the ideas of other thoughtful people inside and outside of government, are given full consideration in that process."

Update II: Russ Feingold, also via email:

Unfortunately, the Iraq Study Group report does too little to change the flawed mind-set that led to the misguided war in Iraq. Maybe there are still people in Washington who need a study group to tell them that the policy in Iraq isn’t working, but the American people are way ahead of this report.

While the report has regenerated a few good ideas, it doesn’t adequately put Iraq in the context of a broader national security strategy. We need an Iraq policy that is guided by our top national security priority – defeating the terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11 and its allies. We can’t continue to just look at Iraq in isolation. Unless we set a serious timetable for redeploying our troops from Iraq, we will be unable to effectively address these global threats. In the end, this report is a regrettable example of ‘official Washington’ missing the point.

Yeah, did you read the study? Shocking! Things in Iraq aren't going well! Who knew?

But let's keep them in there for another two years. Just because.

It's not like it's the elite's children that are doing the fighting and dying.

(I can't wait for Jim Webb to really shake things up in the Senate.)

Update III: Atrios:

Tony Snow on the ISG:

The one thing they thought was absolutely important was to rebuild a sense of national unity on this, and that was their overwhelming objective.

There is national unity. To get the fuck out.

Update IV: Matthew Yglesias:

Gates seems to be part of the "mainstream" elite consensus which holds that Iraq is almost certainly doomed, but that we should sort of keep on prosecuting the war for years and years just because it would be embarrassing to give up and, hell, who knows maybe a pony will come along. That sort of thing works, I think, if and only if you regard the war as a total abstraction, rather than actual events happening to actual people.

And more Yglesias:

An emailer wonders how this hilarous David Broder parody made it into today's Post. The special unintentional comedy prize goes to former Senator Alan Simpson for his observation that "No one wanted to see us embarrassed by being unable to come to consensus."

And there's the rub. The purpose of the commission is for a bipartisan political elite to try to avoid embarrassment.

And a reminder, as the ISG heroically struggled to "avoid embarrassment", 10 GIs paid the ultimate price:

Ten American service members were killed in two  improvised explosive device attacks in Iraq on Wednesday, NBC News reported. The news came hours after a mortar attack killed at least eight people and wounded dozens in the Sadr City Shiite district of the capital, police said.

In the 10 American deaths, five troops were killed in the north, and five were killed in Anbar province, a U.S. military official told NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski. No further details were immediately available.

But in Washington, as long as none of the bipartisan DC elite get embarrassed those are acceptable losses.