political nonsense

Democrats didn’t know what they would do with Iraq, if they had the power to do anything.

Democratic leaders and candidates are virtually unanimous in opposing the president’s conduct of the war, and most advocate American disengagement — either quickly or slowly. But most are not calling for an immediate withdrawal of American forces or offering a vision of what postwar Iraq should look like. They say they stand for change, but the variety of formulations is dizzying.

Nineteen House members sponsored a bill to cut off funds for the war. The Democratic Senate candidate in Pennsylvania opposes a deadline for ending American involvement in Iraq. The Democratic candidate for Senate in Ohio wants all the troops out within two years. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the current minority leader who is likely to be the next speaker of the House if Democrats win back the chamber, is calling for immediate steps to begin to remove American forces, with all of them out of Iraq by the end of 2007.

“We haven’t coalesced around a single plan,” Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat who is up for re-election this year, acknowledged in an interview on Thursday. “But, we’re in general agreement on the basic principles.”

The range of proposals in part reflects the military, political and sectarian maze that Iraq has become. With virtually no one contending that an exit would be easy, no one wants to be responsible for a decision that would leave Iraq a smoldering ruin of civil war.

But the range of proposals also illustrates the state of the Democratic Party, which has not held executive power for six years or controlled the Congress for twice that long. There is no dominant figure in the party to formulate a policy position, so a hundred schools of thought contend. And even if the Democrats win one or both houses of Congress, they will not have the authority to change the course of the war significantly.

“The republic is being offered a choice between muck and murk,” said David R. Gergen, an adviser to Republican and Democratic presidents and now a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “Neither party is offering a clear path ahead in Iraq.”
nytimes

This entry was posted on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 9:32 pm and is filed under iraq, main, the bush administration, war. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.