Bush is still banking on Iraq to help win reelection. Yet Iraq is his biggest albatross, and may single-handedly cost him the election.
There's no doubt that Iraq is a mess, but it's not enough to say, "The war was a good idea, Bush just mucked it up." Any argument that sounds like, "Bush did the right thing, I would just do it better" is destined to be a loser. We need clear policy differences. We need to provide voters with a stark choice.
To use Iraq as a blunt weapon, we must attack the very underpinings of the war -- Bush's decision to invade a nation preemptively based on lies, and the decision to focus on Iraq while Al Qaeda was on the run and facing extinction.
Only two of our serious contenders can make that argument -- Dean and Clark. Clark has been hammering Bush as of late.
"If I'd been president, I would have had Osama bin Laden by this time," Clark said at a news conference in Concord, New Hampshire, where he was campaigning for votes in the nation's first primary, January 27.
"I would have followed through on the original sentiment that the president gave us -- Osama bin Laden, dead or alive.
"Instead, he executed a bait-and-switch. He took the priority off Osama bin Laden. He shifted the spotlight onto Saddam Hussein."
Meanwhile, Dean has just delivered what may very well be the
body blow that ends the Kerry, Lieberman and Gephardt campaigns:
Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean on Friday cited the higher terror alert and the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq in arguing that he was right to say Saddam Hussein's capture didn't make America safer.
"They got all excited, but here we are," Dean told a town-hall meeting. "We've lost 10 more troops and F-16s are escorting foreign passenger jets into our air space because we're now more worried than we were before."
Last month, Dean's rivals assailed the front-runner when he said within a day of the Iraqi leader's capture that his apprehension had not made the United States safer, a direct contradiction of President Bush.
Since then, the national terrorism alert has been raised to orange and U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq.
"I can assure you it's not Saddam who's threatening to bomb airplanes," Dean said. "It's al-Qaida. We've not paid attention to al-Qaida. We've spent $160 billion, lost over 400 servicemen, and wounded and permanently maimed over 2,000 people because we picked the wrong target."
Checkmate. And that's beside the fact that we've lost
34 soldiers since Saddam was captured, not ten. (Someone update the guy's notes!)
It's good to see these two Democrats hammer Bush on this critical issue. It means that either of our likely nominees will be able to attack Bush on the Iraq issue without ambiguities, without nuances. Oh, the GOP will try to muddy the issue, but this one should remain clear cut. If Dean and Clark keep talking this way, Bush is going to be in a whole world of hurt.