Yet, even with the political equivocations from the Democrats, their intentions for Iraq likely represent the only hope those who oppose the occupation have for effecting any significant exit or end to the engagement within the next presidential term. Moreover, the republicans' political posturing on Iraq has developed into a contest over which of their candidates intends to dig our troops further into the Iraqi sand, rather than giving any attention, at all, to addressing the demonstrated will of the majority of the American people that we leave Iraq to the Iraqis.
Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, highlighted his advocacy of the Iraq invasion and occupation in his party's debate Wednesday night at the Reagan library, by offering up an excuse for his president's single-handed destruction of the republican party. Asked if the party was better off than before Bush took office, Romney said it wasn't the decider's fault, but "Washington's."
"I don't think we would say it's better off than it was eight years ago, to be truthful. I think the eight years that you've seen -- and I don't blame that on President Bush. I blame that on Washington," Romney said. "He was hit by something which completely took his agenda off course, and that was the Iraq conflict and the attack of 9/11, and Afghanistan. All these things came together," he explained.
Romney wanted to 'make it clear' in the debate, that he would not "pull our troops out until we have brought success in Iraq, and that means that, we do not have safe havens for al Qaeda or Hezbollah or anyone else, that our troops have secured the population from that kind of threat, that they will not have safe havens from which they could launch attacks against us."
Romney, who once conceded that, "Iraq is a mess," is now preparing to join the emerging "surge is a success" club which his rival, John McCain, is angling to become president of. McCain, in the debate, rejected the notion that his party lost both houses of Congress in the last election because of their position on Iraq.
"We have to understand that we lost the 2006 election and the Democrats thought that they had a mandate," McCain said. "They thought they had a mandate to get us out of Iraq . . . I have fought for this surge, he argued, "I have said we need to have this succeed. I know the situation in Iraq and I am proud to have supported this president and supported the fact that we are succeeding in Iraq today."
McCain has also said that a 100-year U.S. military presence in Iraq would "be fine" with him. "As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me," he had said. Asked about the comment, later, McCain upped the ante to "a thousand years or a million years."
It's hard to imagine any position the Democratic candidates may take on Iraq which approaches that level of commitment to perpetual chaos and unending militarism. If there is a judgment made by the vast majority of Americans favoring a hasty withdrawal from Iraq, which is based only on these two republicans candidates' marriage to Bush's stubborn refusal to disengage, there can be no other option but to support one of the Democratic nominees to victory in the presidential election, whoever that may be.
There is the presumed republican frontrunner (and his republican rival) proposing to keep our military engaged in Iraq for the sole purpose of defending the propped-up government there against the consequences and effects of the occupation itself. McCain wants to section-off Bush's "surge" of troops into Iraq and present that escalation of force as its own insulated conflict, removed from the untidy questions of the lies which took us there, or the shifting justifications for remaining.
"We are succeeding. We are succeeding," McCain pleaded. "And I unequivocally put my career and my political fortunes on the line and unequivocally said we're going to support this surge. We're not going to talk about timetables or anything else; we're going to talk about winning and what's necessary to win," he said.
"And I'm the only one that said that Rumsfeld had to go and the Petraeus strategy is the one that can succeed. That's because I have the experience, the knowledge, and the judgment."
That collective "knowledge and judgment" from McCain and his fellow republicans has taken a nation, which was managing relative 'peace and prosperity eight years ago, and created a world of conflict and a stagnation of the fortunes of average Americans here at home. In their full embrace and support of their presidential orchestrator and his agenda abroad, they have demonstrated their intentions to continue and deepen Bush's manufactured quagmire.
Our Democratic candidates stand, and will remain, in stark opposition to all of that, even in their equivocations. That may well be more of a measure of republicans' extremism than of some solid affinity with every plank of anti- occupation voters bottom line, but it's as firm a contrast as we're going to get, or should need to make a choice in the general election.
