WP's Eugene Robinson calls 'em out by name: "Wanted: Democratic Straight Talk on Iraq"

[DeepModem Mom]

Wanted: Democratic Straight Talk on Iraq
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, September 28, 2007; Page A19

Yes, you heard it right: At the Dartmouth College debate Wednesday evening, not one of the three leading Democratic candidates could pledge that all U.S. combat troops would be out of Iraq by the end of his or her first term as president. That's the end of a first term. Which would be January 2013. Which would be 5 1/2 years from now.

"It is very difficult to know what we're going to be inheriting," said Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"I think it's hard to project four years from now," said Barack Obama.

"I cannot make that commitment," said John Edwards....

In geopolitical terms, I think the answer they all gave is wrong; I think this represents the same kind of old-paradigm thinking about foreign policy and America's role in the world that all three candidates claim to reject. In just-plain-political terms, I think such temporizing -- delivered with furrowed brow and an air of wise gravitas -- is, at the very least, unwisely premature. The time for a Democratic candidate to start taking the antiwar vote for granted and scurrying toward an imagined "center" is after securing the nomination, not before. Democratic primary voters are smart enough to recognize the difference between saying you oppose the war and pledging to end it. I'm also wondering what leads anyone to think that by the time the general election campaign gets underway, anything short of a clear promise to pull the plug on George W. Bush's debacle will look like a centrist position. By then, "U.S. troops out in a year" may look like the height of caution.

With all due respect to Clinton, we have a pretty good idea of what the next president will inherit....One thing we don't know is whether Bush will have sought to tie the next president's hands by ordering some kind of attack on Iran. Yes, that would complicate the situation in Iraq. So why did Clinton vote Wednesday for a Senate resolution encouraging Bush to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization? Having voted to authorize the Iraq war -- she says Bush pulled the wool over her eyes -- why would she vote for anything that Bush might try to use as justification for yet another potentially catastrophic war?

With all due respect to Obama (who missed the Iran vote), it's his obligation to "project four years from now."...Either Obama sees a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq or he doesn't. With all due respect to Edwards, of course he can make a commitment to have all American troops out of Iraq by 2013 -- if he wants to. Of course it's possible that unforeseen events will intervene. But does his intended course of action entail complete withdrawal, or not?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/27/AR2007092701658.html?nav=most_emailed