Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama travel the country claiming they'll get us out of Iraq. Yet they refuse to commit to a withdrawal of our forces by any set date. They maintain they'll have to see what the circumstances are in Iraq when they become President in 2009 before making a decision on whether to leave Iraq.

At the Democratic Presidential debate at Dartmouth College, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards each refused to commit to withdraw our troops from Iraq by 2013, the end of the first term of their hypothetical presidencies. When the question was put to Clinton, she responded, "It is very difficult to know what we're going to be inheriting." Obama dodged as well: "I think it would be irresponsible" to say what he would do as President. Edwards replied: "I cannot make that commitment."

Hillary Clinton is worst of the three on Iraq. Despite Clinton's assurances to voters that she will end the war, which many voters believe and explains her lead in the polls, if she becomes President, the opportunity to end our open-ended military intervention may be lost. Clinton pledges to end the war but has no plan to do so. Instead, Clinton intends to ask military and diplomatic advisers to study the issue and develop a plan after taking office.

For advice on Iraq presently, Clinton relies upon persons that believe the war has gone wrong because of poor leadership by the Bush Administration but that the decision to invade was correct. Many of these same advisers have supported the surge and see the U.S. intervention in Iraq continuing for at least another decade.

While Obama and Edwards favor a pullout, as noted by Bill Boyarsky:

their withdrawal proposals foresee no end in sight. Obama wants to leave enough troops to support the Iraqi army and police and conduct specialized counterterrorism operations. Edwards favors a complete withdrawal of combat troops in Iraq in the next 12-18 months without leaving behind any permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq. But he hedges, too, wanting to leave enough troops in Iraq to assure that instability in Iraq doesn't spill over to other countries and cause another war, create a terrorist haven or permit genocide.

There is an alternative. There is a candidate that says as long as U.S. troops are stationed in Iraq the hard work of reconciliation among Iraqi factions is postponed. This candidate has called for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq now, pledges to bring all U.S. troops (both combat and non-combat) home promptly upon taking office and has offered a plan to achieve this.

This candidate has decades of experience in foreign affairs. He is being advised by military and diplomatic experts that have been highly critical of the U.S. intervention in the Iraq and strongly advocate an immediate exit from Iraq.

This candidate is Bill Richardson. He calls for a prompt and complete exit from Iraq.

Our troops have done everything they were asked to do with courage and professionalism, but they cannot win someone else's civil war. So long as American troops are in Iraq, reconciliation among Iraqi factions is postponed. Leaving forces there enables the Iraqis to delay taking the necessary steps to end the violence. And it prevents us from using diplomacy to bring in other nations to help stabilize and rebuild the country.

Whom is advising Richardson and support his call for a prompt and complete withdrawal from Iraq?

First, there is former Lt. General Robert Gard, Jr. Gard has written extensively on the war, observing:

The decision to invade Iraq was one of the greatest blunders - if not the greatest blunder - in U.S. foreign policy history. It is the major reason we have lost the support of the world community, and it has diverted our attention from the legitimate target of our military force - al-Qaida and other jihadists.

Even if we grant the proponents of the Iraq war legitimate motives, the way the war was conducted was inexcusable. Despite warnings from foreign policy experts, the administration embarked on the venture without international support, sacrificing the goodwill that 9/11 had generated.

Overwhelming majorities of Iraqis, both Shia and Sunni, oppose the presence of US troops in Iraq and believe that US troops are more a cause of violence than a solution to it. Our presence in Iraq fuels the insurgency, strengthens Al Qaeda, and distracts us from the urgent task of defeating the real terrorists who attacked this country on 9-11. It's time for a phased and coordinated, but rapid, withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq, and Governor Richardson has a realistic plan to do it.

Take the casus belli in both instances. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was largely a nonevent and Iraq had no WMDs. The reports about the incident and the weapons were both deliberately and grossly exaggerated in order to justify going to war. It is true that Saddam Hussein failed to show the United Nations that he had gotten rid of the banned weapons. The documentation he gave the United Nations was inadequate and did not prove the negative. So we went to war over an accounting error?

The rationale for both wars was also faulty. There were no vital national interests at stake in either of them. Vietnam went communist and the rest of the southeast Asia did not fall like a row of dominoes. Iraq without WMD posed no immediate threat to the United States. Thanks to the new draft constitution, Iraq is on its way to becoming a theocracy. But even if it were genuinely democratic, that would not topple every totalitarian regime in the region like a row of dominoes.

Despite all the rhetoric and resolutions emanating from Washington, two fundamental facts about the war in Iraq won't change. The killing will continue, but not all of it has to. Iraqis will continue to die in large numbers regardless of what the United States does. The troop surge will shift the violence to other locations or cause the combatants to go underground for a time, but will do nothing to resolve the reasons for the fighting. The ignorance, arrogance and incompetence of the American architects of the invasion and its aftermath have created the perfect storm of factors that made the current civil war possible and inevitable for years to come. The deepening of the sectarian divide, the struggle over who gets to steal the oil revenue and the proxy fight for influence being waged by other countries in the region all ensure that peace will not break out soon. . .

At one point not so long ago, the war was sold to the voters with the claim that creating a democracy in Iraq would be easy and would spread across the region. Now the excuse for having to stay is that the chaos in Iraq will engulf the region. Both these variations of the domino theory are wrong, and the damage we are doing to our national security by staying is far greater than we would do by getting out.

Phillip Coyle, a senior advisor to the Center for Defense Information, has been advising Richardson on Iraq and our military. The CDI has been highly critical of the war and advocated for our withdrawal. See Five Reasons to Leave Iraq. Coyle served as an assistant secretary of defense under President Clinton.

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