“President Bush thinks we should stay in Iraq forever, as far as the eye can see. He’s said it himself. He says, ‘Getting out of Iraq is up 
to presidents who come after me.’ I don’t agree. That’s too long. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get our troops out of Iraq in 6 months or even a year. But I want to start working on getting them home as soon as I get into office. And staying in Iraq for at least three more years, like President Bush wants, is too long.
My opponent is with President Bush on this. More of a blank check. I disagree.
We’ve got too many challenges around the world to keep burning through money and our men and women in uniform just because President Bush can’t admit that his policies aren’t working.”
Who said that?
Actually, no one has, as far as I know. But why can’t someone?
There may be other things to say about Iraq on the campaign trail this year. But it seems silly to me for Democrats to allow themselves to get bogged down in discussions of precise timelines or worry overly much if not everyone agrees on just the best way to extricate ourselves from the mess the president has gotten us into (though here they do seem to have come up with a consensus platform).
It’s not easy to agree since the mess the president has created is so entrenched that there really are no easy answers. But the president has put out there a tangible and concrete statement that he plans to keep our current deployment of troops in Iraq for three more years. That’s wildly out of line with where the country is. And the president’s words — which Republicans in Congress are tied to — say clearly that it’s autopilot from now until 2009. No one wants that.
On substance, the simple truth is that the president has no policy on Iraq. His goal is to keep everything in place until 2009 so he can leave it to someone else. Why should Democrats cower and run from this debate? The debate itself is silly. No one agrees with the president. The point of the ‘debate’ is to get Democrats to run from the issue itself, thus signalling their lack of ‘toughness’ on Iraq through their lack of toughness in domestic political debate. The president has given his opponents an albatross to hang about his neck. So why not use it? On this count, Democrats really do have nothing to fear but fear itself.
