Candidates distance Iraq
They don’t agree on much, but top presidential candidates from both parties seem to think that getting too close to Iraq will doom their White House dreams. They’ve given new meaning to running for office, as in running away from the war.
The wholesale retreat is most obvious when you measure how incremental steps, taken over a relatively short time, add up to big changes by virtually every candidate. Instead of notorious flip-flops, the candidates are using slip-slide maneuvers to find safer ground. President Bush gets no praise and little support from either party.
Democrats lead the charge, but top Republicans are close behind. The changes are coming so fast that the candidates’ new stances are morphing almost daily as events in Iraq deteriorate and American voters turn more firmly and loudly against the war.
The retreat is reshaping the campaign, but its effects won’t end there. Other likely casualties are the major pillars of Bush’s post-Sept. 11 foreign policy, such as staying on the offensive against terrorists and trying to spread democracy to the Middle East. His rigid stance on Iran also is losing favor, as growing numbers of critics want to open direct talks.
The evidence that the next president’s foreign policy is being concocted on the fly is on full display almost every day, as Sen. John McCain demonstrated Monday. On the stump in South Carolina, the Arizona Republican suddenly switched gears. Instead of his usual warning about the catastrophic consequences of failure in Iraq, McCain blasted former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as being “one of the worst secretaries of defense in history,” according to an Associated Press account. It said his comment was greeted with applause by a crowd of 800. As the AP noted, when Rumsfeld got the boot in November, McCain said that “while Secretary Rumsfeld and I have had our differences, he deserves Americans’ respect and gratitude for his many years of public service.” What a difference a few months make.
McCain’s new emphasis came several days after the GOP front-runner, ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, took his first steps away from Bush. Giuliani, who had been stressing his support for Bush’s troop surge, told CNN he was not fully confident of the new effort and said America made a big mistake early on. “Here’s what I would change,” Giuliani said of the invasion. “Do it with more troops.”
Among Democrats, Sen. Hillary Clinton is running fast to keep up with her opponents and primary voters. Clinton, who long resisted calls for a withdrawal time line, is now promoting a plan to begin pulling troops out of Iraq. It was only a month ago when she first talked about a cap on troop strength, and the cap has now been one-upped by a call for phased withdrawal. Other Democratic candidates, such as Sen. Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards, are even more dovish.
If the bipartisan trend continues, it will add to the intense pressure on Bush. With about 70 percent of the public opposing his policy, and with his wanna-be successors jumping on the bandwagon, he is running out of time to show progress. Some leading Democrats in Congress are threatening to block funds for the war, a move that would have been unthinkable only months ago.
The way we’re going, that’s where we’re headed. And much faster than Bush realizes.