[Mb-civic] Feingold leads way on Iraq war - Robert Kuttner - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Feingold leads way on Iraq war

By Robert Kuttner  |  October 8, 2005

PRESIDENT BUSH, faced with plummeting support for the war in Iraq, keeps 
turning to an old standby. In another high-profile speech on Thursday, 
Bush warned Americans to be terrified of terror, and tried once again to 
tie Iraq to Al Qaeda and the attacks of 9/11.

The public isn't buying it. A large majority -- 64 to 32 in CBS polls -- 
opposes Bush's conduct of the war.

Yet the opposition party has been mostly missing in action. Democratic 
pollsters and political advisers seem to believe that with Bush failing 
as a war president Democrats should stay out of the way and let him sink.

There is an obsessive worry that Democrats, above all, cannot risk 
looking weak on defense. If the war keeps going badly and Democrats are 
seen as opposing it, one strategist told me, they risk getting the blame.

Senior foreign policy Democrats, such as Senators Joseph Biden, John 
Kerry, and Hillary Clinton, have been willing to criticize Bush's 
decision to take the country to war on false pretenses, as well as his 
conduct of the war. But they have not offered a serious discussion of 
how to get us out.

This mentality is the opposite of leadership. The failure of the 
opposition party to offer a coherent alternative is one reason why 
support for the Democrats has not been rising as support for Bush sinks. 
It is why Democrats have become the butt of Jay Leno jokes as not 
standing for anything.

One Democrat who has offered another course -- and he must be feeling 
very lonely -- is Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. He has urged the 
United States to make a commitment to get all combat troops out of Iraq 
by the end of 2006. As Feingold says, we need a coherent alternative to 
either ''stay the course" or ''cut and run." That alternative is phased 
withdrawal.

Feingold told a Los Angeles audience in late August: ''The president and 
others say that if we leave, it will just be chaos in Iraq. Well, right 
now when you come to Iraq, you can't even drive from the airport to the 
Green Zone" Even inside the supposedly secure Green Zone, Feingold 
recounted, he was given a helmet and flak jacket.

He added: ''The president says if we leave Iraq on some kind of a 
timetable, our enemies will know that we are weak. I would say that 
without a plan to finish, our enemies will know that we have fallen into 
a trap." Feingold further observed that by calling for a timetable for 
withdrawal, he had broken what had become a disabling ''taboo."

Critics of the war should be seriously exploring how a phased withdrawal 
would actually work. If the United States agreed to pull out, what role 
might NATO and the UN play? What could be expected of other states in 
the region?

Among many Democratic policy intellectuals unwilling to embrace a 
timetable for full withdrawal, the second-best is seen as a large 
reduction of troop levels. The idea is to pull back troops from forward 
positions where they are exposed to attack, and keep a smaller force 
garrisoned in Baghdad and other bases.

In principle, this is clever politics -- some troops could come home, 
and casualties might be reduced. The problem is that the countryside 
would essentially be ceded to insurgents, who would loudly proclaim 
their victory over the Great Satan. Iraq would actually be pushed closer 
to civil war. There would be just enough American troops to continue to 
be a lightning rod for armed insurgency, but far too few to pacify the 
place. A full withdrawal would make much more sense.

The dithering Democrats may find that public opinion has passed them by. 
In the most recent CBS news poll, American adults, by a large margin of 
59 to 36, want the United States out of Iraq as soon as possible, even 
if the country is not stabilized. Among Democrats, the margin rises to 
73 to 24, or 3 to 1.

Feingold is no radical. He gets elected in a swing state as a man of 
integrity and independence. He teamed up with Republican John McCain on 
campaign finance reform. He voted in favor of John Roberts for chief 
justice.

If the war is still going on in 2008, an antiwar candidate such as 
Feingold would be an odds-on favorite to win the Democratic presidential 
nomination over bigger names disabled by their own fatal caution.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/10/08/feingold_leads_way_on_iraq_war/
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