Whichever of the Democratic Seven you're backing or leaning toward backing for the presidential nomination - even if you're desperately hoping somebody else will join the field - it's worth checking out what Dennis Kuninich, Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chris Dodd and John Edwards had to say last evening at the MoveOn.org Virtual Town Hall on Iraq.
Unsurprisingly, nobody laid out any new proposals for extricating the United States from Iraq. If, for instance, you don't like what you've heard from them so far, you're not going like what they said last night. If you do, then you'll get to hear a reiteration. It's useful, however, having their views all in one place for comparison.
Nobody should draw any conclusions about which, if any, candidate I may wind up supporting in the primaries from the fact that I'm now going to single out just one of them to praise. I haven't made up my mind who to back, and it's doubtful that I will for months. But whether or not you agree with the proposal John Edwards laid out in February to limit spending in Iraq to 100,000 troops - which would require initiating an immediate withdrawal of one-third of U.S. armed forces there - and whether he's your first choice for the Democratic nomination or your first choice to get knocked out in the primaries because you're still distrustful of him for his "aye" vote on the October 2002 Iraq War Resolution, he surely deserves kudos for this:
We know George Bush and Karl Rove will deploy the full-fury of their PR machine to blame Democrats for Bush’s choice, Bush’s choice to veto funding for the troops. There are many people in Washington that are gonna be tempted to cry uncle, and they’ll say, they’re gonna let Bush win another round in this fight. So where will Congress find the courage to stand firm? I’ll tell you where they’ll find it: they’ll find it in your letters. They’ll find it in your calls. They will find it in your voice. Forty years ago, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a sermon speaking out against the war in Vietnam. He said, "There comes a time in all of our lives where silence is a betrayal."
Any wavering Democrats should heed Edwards's words. But the House and Senate should go further than what Edwards suggests. More must be done than merely passing another funding bill with timetables attached until the President caves. Some of us weren't too keen on backing the supplemental bill in the first place, especially based on the argument that "this is the best we can get." It struck some of us as surrendering before the battle. However, it's impossible to deny that the Democratic leadership has done a bang-up job of taking full tactical and propaganda advantage of the bill and putting Bush and the Republicans on the deep defensive.
However, if Bush vetoes the bill - and despite all his promises, that is not wholly certain - the next bill to reach his desk should be tougher and smarter.
Ridiculous, you say? How in the world can that possibly succeed given the fragile margins that got the current legislation passed?
By resurrecting Murtha Plan #2.
That proposal never got a fair hearing the first time around, thanks in large part to the efforts of some of the Blue Dog Democrats. If now it were to get a hearing, and that hearing were to get the broad publicity it deserves, and the Democratic leadership were to do the kind of framing that Edwards did last night, hawkish Democrats and many Republicans might have a very hard time opposing it.
This isn't to suggest that Feingold-Reid shouldn't also be on the agenda. It most definitely should. But that legislation, which would start withdrawal within 120 days of passage is unlikely to get through the Senate or the House, much less past the President. The Murtha Plan, on the other hand, could. Because it has appeal for the guys with semper fi pasted on their bumpers as well as those of us with Out Now! symbols stuck on ours. (There should be, in fact, no reason a bumper can't have both.)
The Murtha plan includes what for the Bush Administration is yet another poison pill. Bush would get his funding (with timetables), but be prohibited from sending (or re-sending) troops to Iraq unless they were properly rested, properly trained and properly equipped. That is plain common sense whether you think the Iraq invasion was a smart and necessary action or that it was the worst move the U.S. has made since Harry Truman ignored Ho Chi Minh's letters seeking help to kick the French out of postwar Vietnam.
A targeted selection of Senators and Representatives who object to the Murtha Plan could be verbally ambushed in public forums in their home districts: Sir (or ma'am, as the case may be), do you think we should send exhausted soldiers back to Iraq before they have rested? You do? Should National Guardsmen be sent to fight without adequate training? They should? Do Marines deserve to have adequate armor and other equipment when they are sent to stand in the middle of somebody else's civil war? They don't? Put together a dozen or so of these Q&As up as YouTube videos (or ads in the mainstream media). And then let's see these elected officials try to argue what great patriots they are.
Any politician who is willing to ship American fighting women and men off to war (any war) without training them, equipping them and making sure they have enough downtime between combat assignments is a scoundrel. Yes, you Blue Dogs, if you're one of these, then I mean you, too.
For those of us who have long been in the Out Now! brigade, it might seem strange to support the quite conservative Murtha Plan. But the beauty of it is that it starts working immediately. No need to wait 120 days to start a withdrawal. Anybody who doesn't meet the trained-rested-equipped requirements doesn't go to Iraq in the first place. And anybody already in Iraq who doesn't meet them gets to come home right away. That process cannot help but build an inexorable momentum that will, ultimately, bring us to Murtha Plan #1, his December 2005 proposal seeking to get the troops out of Iraq as soon as logistically possible, four-six months.
A little more from that speech of Martin Luther King's on April 4, 1967, 40 years ago:
If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Indeed.
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