Murray: Quick Iraq exit impossible

Calls to bring the troops home tomorrow, or on the first day of the next president’s term, aren’t just unrealistic, they’re impossible, Sen. Patty Murray said Tuesday.

It would take up to 18 months to get them all out, unless the United States wanted to leave tanks and other weapons behind, she said.

“We don’t want to leave our armor and our equipment and our arms sitting in Iraq for somebody else to use,” Murray said in an interview with The Spokesman-Review editorial board.

Washington’s senior Democratic senator voted against giving President Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq and hasn’t changed her views on it. But she said the calls by some war opponents, including some of her party’s presidential candidates, to cut off all war funding and leave immediately just can’t happen.

The real question, she said, is “how do you get out of there in a responsible way?”

Because al-Qaida in Iraq is a target in the war on terror, she added, the United States can’t pull all the troops out of that country and say “we’re not going to pay attention to you.”

But Murray does believe the United States should start reducing its troops in Iraq and try to force the Iraqi government to take control. It may be the “least bad solution” among a series of bad solutions, she said, but it is the one that has not been tried.

Murray was in Spokane during a brief congressional break to mark the ceremonial opening of the new 24-hour emergency department at the Veterans Affairs hospital, talk with health care professionals and talk at the Distinguished Speaker series about what works and what doesn’t.

The series is sponsored by Avista, the region’s largest private utility, and The Gallatin Group, a Northwest-based public affairs firm.

She used the Senate’s recent passage of a bill banning asbestos products in the United States as an example of what works. She first proposed a ban about seven years ago after talking to victims of mesothelioma, a fatal lung disease that can be caused by asbestos.

But she met roadblocks until earlier this year, when she became chairwoman of a subcommittee and held a hearing on asbestos-related illness. She made sure the panel’s ranking Republican, Johnny Isakson of Georgia, was present for the victims’ testimony. Murray, a liberal Democrat, said she doesn’t agree with the conservative Isakson on much, but he agreed with her on asbestos. They had to be persistent, and they had to compromise on some timelines for the ban.

“No legislation passes when you say ‘It’s my way or the highway,’ ” she said.

Last week, the Senate unanimously agreed on the bill to ban most asbestos products in the country in two years and sent it to the House of Representatives.

Although Murray ranks fourth in the Senate’s Democratic leadership, she said that has to be the model in a Senate that’s divided 51-49 between Democrats and Republicans. From Iraq to expanding children’s health care to deciding how to spend money on highways, nothing is going to get done “on a strictly partisan basis.”

She stayed away from partisanship when asked whether Idaho Sen. Larry Craig should resign rather than remain in office while he continues to fight to withdraw his guilty plea from an undercover sex sting in an airport bathroom. Some Senate Republicans have called for him to step down, as Craig initially said he would, but most Democrats have stayed quiet.

“It’s up to the people of Idaho,” she said after the editorial board interview. “I would not tell Larry Craig what he should or shouldn’t do.”