Monday, June 13, 2005

Legislators rethinking Iraq war

Well! elephant A couple prominent Republicans (including the infamous "freedom fries" booster) are changing positions on Iraq, starting to call for a timely withdrawel plan. It's clear enough that things aren't improving, and legislators seem to be responding to the increasing difficulty in finding new cannon fodder military recruits to fuel the effort. Perhaps Atrios is right in claiming that now is the time for Democrats to get out front on the stance that invading Iraq was wrong, rather than picking around the edges of how the details are being handled.

Update: military brass say bullets won't solve anything in Iraq. Kos adds to the above sentiments,
The problems have been created by Bush and his ill-advised invasion, but they can't be solved by us. It's time to exit stage left, and hope that Iraqis can sort things out for themselves.
A sad, sad fallback position, but there you are.

4 comments:

Dumplingeater said...

On the other hand, is the Democratic Party moving the other way? Check out this article (it also relates somewhat to your post on "values).

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8194578/

ACM said...

I see this quote: “While most of us believe we should never have gone in there in the first place, many of us believe that now that we’re there, we have no choice but to finish the job. It would be both immoral and dangerous to bail out of that part of the world, given what we know today.”

I can certainly sympathize with that sentiment. However, I don't think it represents a "moving the other way" -- rather, I think that this is the rather conventional point of view (pre-existing) that Atrios is arguing against in his post . . .

Dumplingeater said...

True, that viewpoint represents tendencies that have been around for a while. And I'm not unsympathetic to the complexity of formulating a platform on what to do about Iraq now. But I also thought it interesting that Dean, of all people, didn't mention Iraq at the DNC meeting -- and that the rest of the article has quotes suggesting that the DNC seems to be moving towards positions directed at not alienating "values voters." I'm not at all sure that's a bad thing, or that it is representative of a "move the other way," but I think it might be a good question to ask.

Anonymous said...

bush didn't deserve a second term.
it's frightening that the america
people re elected him. now the
euphemistic "people" are getting
what they paid for, a war that was predicated on lies, and phony
intelligence. operation iraqi
freedom? not on my sons lives.