Be careful about your question, because Obama might say "I will have the troops out as soon as I take office," then vote for a Republican bill to fund the troops into 2010.

Those are only applause lines because the audience is filled with sheep.  

The fact that she feels compelled to constantly bring up the fact that she's a woman speaks volumes about the rightness of her ship.  Her campaign will be in trouble soon.

I heard her deliver this line (I believe) shortly after she announced and I was taken aback at how un-triangulated the statement was. Until I started hearing the parsing about "combat troops"...  Looks like we will have 120,000 "advisors" in Iraq for sometime.

I believe Congress must fight to end the war, for I believe whoever is elected will have staked out a position against the war, yet will not govern accordingly. In 64, Johnson was the peace candidate. In 68, Nixon had a secret plan to end the war. In 72, peace was at hand.

one thing is said and another is meant, and the belief is that the people in the audiance are to stupid to notice the difference.

OR take #2:

Those are the lines where you say one thing, but really mean another, and by the time you get in office, you do it your way and then it's too late for anyone to do anything about it, cause your already in office - also implying that most listeners were to stupid to catch the difference in meaning of the orginally statements.

In other words - plain english:  I will say one thing today and another tomorrow, and most likely noone will notice.

I'm not puzzled. It's what I expect from Clinton Supporters. They still don't even realize that Bill is not the one running for President. Obama and Edwards got the smart ones. Hillary got the "half baked in the head" ones.

LOL

"Require a complete withdrawal of combat troops in Iraq within the next 12-18 months without leaving behind any permanent bases in Iraq."

Edwards does want troops to remain the region.  

"After withdrawal, Edwards believes that sufficient forces should remain in the region to contain the conflict and ensure that instability in Iraq does not spillover and create a regional war, a terrorist haven, or spark a genocide. In addition, Edwards believes the U.S. should step up our diplomatic efforts by engaging in direct talks with all the nations in the region, including Iran and Syria and work to bring about a political solution to the sectarian violence inside Iraq, including through a peace conference."

The plan is to keep about 50K troops in Iraq in the permanent bases that have already been constructed. If you parse Obama's statements or Edwards' statements, you'll see that they are consistent with an indefinite occupation of this magnitude.

It's so nice to have Hillary to kick around again after the Obama fiasco today.

I guess being the "half baked in head" Hillary supporter that I am, I'll just wait for Obama to tell me how many non-combat troops he thinks he will need to remain in Iraq to train the Iraqis and conduct counter-terrorism operations, as his plans stipulate.

I guess I will also wait for Edwards to tell me where in the region he plans to keep those non-combat troops who are going to prevent genocide and contain the spillover in to the region.  I'll also wait for him to tell me how many he will need.  Does he have plans to train the Iraqis and where would he do that?

As far as I remember, that 75,000 was not a definite number and not one she actually provided, but I could be wrong.

You all may want to read the fine print of the other candidates, because Hillary is certainly not the only one using the "combat troop" language.

If the Progressive position is complete withdrawal, then you should object to any and all plans that leaves troops in Iraq or the region.  Every single plan that has come out seem to leave room for troops in or around Iraq and none set a cap as to how many is needed for counter-terrorism, national security and training the Iraqis.

Army veteran here, I know it's a common civilian misconception that once a war is over, the troops all come home.  That's never been the case.  Lots of us can tell you we are deployed to overseas bases in countries from wars long past, Germany and Korea being the most well known.  I myself was deployed in Bosnia for a tour, six years after we had "officially" left that country.  

Now, 75,000 troops may sound like alot but I'm guessing if anything, it's probably an underestimate.  To put it in perspective, the U.S. had hundreds of thousands in troops in Germany for decades after WWII and over 50,000 troops a year in South Korea for two decades after the war ended.  And keep in mind those troops were stationed in countries which were alot more stable than Iraq is now.  

Why do we keep our military there?  Much of it is strategic.  Most people understand we keep troops in S. Korea to have them readily available in case of a confrontation with N. Korea or other countries in that region.  The same reasoning would apply for why we'd keep troops in Iraq, because of Iran.  To build and maintain bases takes alot of manpower.  Plus, the U.S. troops do peace-keeping and nation-building activities.  You got everything from your engineers trying to rebuild infrastructure to MPs trying to keep order.  I expect Iraq will need alot of those.

So basically whenever Hillary or any candidate talks about keeping troops after the war, it's talk about a military reality with a long precedent.  I think people ought to be aware that the costs of when the U.S. wages war includes hundreds or thousands of military personnel and millions of dollars tied up for decades after the war is done.  It's a cost that's overlooked time and again, and I wish it was talked about more, because maybe it'd encourage restraint when we talk about waging war.

You say your not addressing the substance of her "plan," but that's not really true Matt.  Clearly you think what she's apparently proposing is a bad idea.  I do too, at least if s he really is talking about that large of a troop commitment and planning to locate them in Iraq.  But lets not pretend you're not against (I'm guessing) ANY troops staing in or around Iraq.

To be fair, I think you need to say that and why you feel that way  if you're going to make these arguments.  I'm peronally not a military or foreign policy expert, so MAYBE there is a reason that some troops need to stay in the region.  Maybe that's BS.  Either way, doesn't it make sense to have a conversation about that rather than just implying that none of the candidates are "really" antiwar, whatever that means?

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to be snarky with this comment.  I'd just like to actually understand what the need is/isn't for some troops staying.  From my perspective, the fewer the better.

Getting on my soapbox here, I really hate that questions on the Iraq war are entirely constructed on how many troops are leaving and when.  Those questions do not get to the root of the problem at all.

The questions I would like to see asked about Iraq (or related to Iraq):

1. Is the goal to stabilize Iraq before the U.S. leaves the country and if so, what are the specific measures by which you would judge it to be stable?  If stability is not the goal, and Iraq's civil war intensifies and turns into a humanitarian crisis, would you intercede and if so, how?
   
2. What is your long-term strategy for Afghanistan?
   
3. What do you think the current administration is doing right, and what would you do differently, in handling relations with Iran and North Korea?
   
4. How do you counter the criticism that leaving Iraq would embolden terrorists to bring the war to the U.S?
   
5. How highly would you prioritize and what would you do to improves relations with allies in the Middle East and around the world?
   
6. In reviewing our Homeland Security measures, what changes would you implement to improve it?
   
7. The U.S. military has been described as "broke" by critics from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  As president, how would you "fix" it to improve the readiness of our forces?

I believe if we knew their answers to these questions, we'd get a much better idea of the fitness of these candidates in a post-2008 presidency.

I agree with Matt Stoller. I am confused and puzzled as well.  I totally agree with Matt that the other candidates should give  fuller details on what redeployment means to them.

I said at the time that the Clinton interview was published that the presidential candidates, as well as Murtha, Pelosi and others all left troops in Iraq after the "was was over".  None of them put a actual number of troops in their plans that I am aware of, and somebody else put the number 75,000 into the Hillary interview.  

So do any of them have any numbers or even approximation of numbers? to what degree do their criteria for leaving troops in Iraq differ from each others' or Hillary's.If we knew  that it might  tell us something about how they will govern and how they see  America's role in the world.

But I have a seemingly simple question.  All the Democrats, presidential candidates included,  have just voted for the the language about leaving troops behind, i.e. redeployment,  in the supplemental budget. Is this language binding on our government's policy just for the six month or 1 year time frame that the supplemental  covers .... or is this language binding until the objective is achieved  i.e. the war is over as measured by this bill.  So are Hillary, Obama, Edwards, Biden etal bound by this language and the numbers that may be implicit in these numbers (though I don't know how to figure out what the numbers should be ---10,000, 50,000?)?

And to what degree, if any, do their plans differ from the Supplemental?  And if they're different, how do they achieve their policy in 2009 if the language of the 2007 is still binding when they are president ( from my keyboard to God's ears)

And when we press them about why aren't as they are forthright about their intentions as Hillary seems to have been, and we want more details from them, we also need to know and ask... how do they reconcile their hypothetical plans with the real bills now being passed, with their support, by this Congress.  

Just one caveat...Crassly, is it good political sense for the Democratic party to put numbers on how many troops stay in Iraq "after the war is over"?  What effect does that have on the American public?  Hillary spoke of tasks as well, she explicitly refused to put numbers into it, though the Pat Healy, the reporter,  did that for her.  Do we want to put all the rest of them and the party in that perhaps problematic position?  I am not sure how I feel about that.

Thanks for making it a fine point and starting the momentum going in the direction to question and expect cause and effect ( say something do something) not virtual branding campaign slogans;

you know the elites think the 'masses are asses' they'll say anything to get elected... I know I know cynical how could you;

by the time you are over 40 you learn a thing or two that is why myDD is so great; I believe they defied the usual slow political learning curve to do the terrific job they do;

they like democracy they really do LOL

We didn't keep troops in Vietnam. Congress cut funding and we had to leave.  Was leaving in the manner we did a good thing>  Looking back with a bit of historical perspective, I'm gutted by the image of helicopters leaving the roof of the embassy, Air American pilots trying to get their people out before the bases were overrun.  We were not defeated in Vietnam--we left, and I wish we'd stayed long enough to get our people out of there.  
I see film of those poor desperate people at the embassy gates and think it might be one of the saddest film I've ever seen.  

Look at South Vietnam today.  Anyone associated with the former South Vietnamese Army will never rise out of the underclass, and when you in the Vietnamese underclass your children starve.  You can't go anywhere or talk to the people--they're terrified of being thrown into a reeducation camp.  Sure South Vietnam was corrupt, etc, but these guys in North Vietnam play tough too.

But my main point really is that Iraq is not Vietnam and we can't apply the same model.  We can't just roll out like we just rolled in.  We have to talk to  everyone in the Middle East and keep troops there, at least enough to train those folks, and get our own out.

Bush the father, abandoned the Kurd and Saddam killed the Kurds along with the people in the South, and we just sat there and let it happen.  We have to get our friends out of there, if we're going.  We can't leave people we've made promises to hanging in the wind.

If we do such a thing, then we're the savages.  We have to try to clean up this mess we've made, stay close and try to help right a wrong Bush has made.

Then we can start looking at how we got there.  It doesn't matter that Bush screwed up.  Not a news flash.  What we do now is the real question.  Who cares if Hilliary wont apologizes or that Obama says he was against the war in '02.  What matters now is how we step up, make some sacrifices and do the right thing by the people we've screwed.  It's not enough to say sorry and leave.  Not this time.
 

I agree that taken literally, Hillary's saying that she would take us out of Iraq if elected would obviously have to mean withdrawing every last troop from Iraq (except the embassy, which technically would be US soil). And I believe that a politician should be taken literally at their word, at least in the sense that we have to hold them to their literal word (realizing, of course, that they will often deviate from it, and that to a certain extent this is unavoidable, and in certain cases not really worth pursuing too aggressively--but not this one, of course).

The problem, though, is that this couldn't possibly be what Hillary means (or else she's got a lot of explaining to do to her party and the public given that she voted for a bill that calls for a limited number of troops to remain in Iraq indefinitely). So then why did she say it, or say it this way? Sloppy messaging (and sloppy thinking behind it)? Or intentionally sloppy messaging, in eat her cake and have it fashion? (Otherwise known as unprincipled triangulating and shameless pandering.)

If this isn't what she meant, then she needs to come out and just say it. And if she won't do this, she needs to have her feet held to the fire on it until she either does say it, or her ratings take a hit (as with her pro-war vote and adamant refusal to apologize for it. She can't have it both ways here--if that's indeed what she's trying to do here. But is it? I want to know. And the public deserves to know.

To me, the real issue here isn't whether she supports keeping a limited number of troops in Iraq indefinitely, so long as they have an open, necessary and achievable mission to complete there. One, because, seeing as every other Dem also supports this, one can hardly fault Hillary for supporting such a policy.

And two, because I happen to agree with such a limited role, so long as their numbers are kept low and mission limited to these goals (protecting temporary military bases, embassies, consolates and such, training legitimate Iraqi troops--i.e. not death squads--in lawful military methods--i.e. no torture--and pursuing Al Qaida and its allies--as opposed to insurgents, guerrillas and other forces engaged in Iraq's civil war and whose fight we have no right or need to be involved in).

Rather, to me the real issue is Hillary's apparently saying one thing and voting and intending something quite different. At least the other candidates (and all Dems) have been open about being supportive of keeping a limited number of troops in Iraq for as long as it took to achieve these limited goals, and not tried to have it both ways. Is Hillary trying to do this, though?

And note that my support of such a policy is not hard and set in stone. There are plenty of indications that we're simply not going to be able to properly train Iraqi troops to the level that would make trying to train them worth it, any time soon. Their country simply lacks the sort of political calm and cohesiveness that would make having a well-trained and operating standing conventional army likely.

Instead, we might well be wasting our efforts and/or training some future dictator's private army. But since we started this war, I think we owe it to Iraqis to make a sustained effort to at least try to train their army properly, without actually taking part in combat ourselves. Pottery Barn rules, basically. And in addition to troop training, we should also help Iraq in any other way necessary to get it back on its feet (e.g. economically, politically, technologically).

Of course, civil wars between rival religious and ethnic factions tends to make that kind of hard to do with any great success. E.g. Lebanon. But we should at least try.

In any case, though, whatever policy any Dem happens to believe in, they at least owe it to the public to be open and honest about it--and, hopefully, to have given it extensive thought and study beyond the talking points. Is Hillary not doing this? Certainly seems so. Does she really believe that the public will fall for her quasi if not actually neoliberal policies hiding behind a faux true liberal mask?

The issue is less what policy she supports than how open and honest she is about it. The entire spectrum of policies and approaches to Iraq should clearly be debated out in the open, in as detailed and honest a manner as possibl. But that won't be possible if Hillary won't be open and honest about her Iraq policy.

Even though I don't necessarily share (but do respect) your policy views on Iraq, I'm totally with you on being confused by Hillary on this. What the hell does she actually want to do there? Does she even know?

The plan for Iraq has been, from the outset, for it to serve as the Middle East force projection base, with about 50,000 soldiers stationed permanently there. Every senator knows this, or should know it, because they've voted for appropriations to build said bases and to build an enormous, heavily secured embassy which will serve as the de facto Iraqi government.

The American people want everybody out of Iraq.

This creates a conflict.  So you can either do what Clinton has done, and state expressly that there will be a continued US military presence in Iraq for the indefinite future (which Americans don't want) or you can dance around it the way Obama and Edwards have.  But when you add it up, the plans are substantially the same.

Now whether those plans are achievable is another story entirely.  Those plans assume that Syria, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia will sit still and let those plans happen.  Those plans assume that Iraqis will tolerate, indefinitely, a situation where their government is not sovereign, and they have no national defense force (they have no air or armor, and the US is not going to let them have any).  Those plans assume that none of the various militias will decide that they want to oppose the limited American force--which, of course, would require an intensified occupation that would break the volunteer military.

It's impossible to know what the near future will bring.  Mitchell claims that the republican senators gave Petraeus a deadline of August.  I expect that if the Iraqi situation is still in today's violent stasis when November 08 rolls around that the republicans have fewer than 40 senate seats and the democratic candidate for president will win the election.

Republican strategists know this.  So it's hard to say what will happen this autumn. I do know, however, that Bush has committed the US to either a long-term occupation or a Vietnam-like failure.   That commitment cannot be unwound immediately after the inauguration. It will take years of diplomacy with the surrounding countries to establish a secure and sovereign Iraqi state--and such a state cannot have a significant US military presence.

So it's not surprising that the Dem candidates are not being clear on this issue.  The American people can't have what they want.  Or, rather, the Beltway mentality will not admit an outright declaration of complete failure and ignominious withdrawal by any president.

Before the war started, we had troops on the Kurdish border in the North protecting the Kurds. Also, U.S. troops had been enforcing a no-fly zone in the South of Iraq to protect Shiites. (Obviously, the troops wouldn't be there if this weren't an oil-producing region -- this is not a case of altruism.)

The troops were left over from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and they effectively allowed the Kurdish region to prosper while keeping Sadaam Hussein's power in the South checked.

I imagine this is the same kind of role that the candidates envision after the "combat" forces stand down. In this case, the goal would probably be to keep Al Qaeda and Shiite militants from the Kurdish areas, and to prevent Iranian and Syrian forces from crossing the border into Iraq. Border protection and rebuilding, I believe, would be the goal.

That's just my guess. It would be nice if the candidates were a little more clear on all this.

Here you go...

If we are to believe Edwards and Obama, if they become President they're getting out or Iraq totally. Are you people forgetting about AIPAC?  

We are never getting out of IRAQ. We're going to build permanent bases there. Why do you think Iran is up in arms? Stop living is "La La" land. Edwards and Obama aren't being truthful or realistic. If either becomes President, they won't have the guts to totally leave IRAQ. We can't and we won't leave. Blame Bush and his stupid ass Administration, not the messenger. We have made the World less safe by invading Iraq. We don't have a choice. AIPAC will own the Dem or Repub nominee anyway; therefore we're staying in IRAQ permanently.

Hillary, on the other had said from the beginning she will leave troops in IRAQ to help the Iraqi troops. You people love to try to take Hillary down on every word. Edwards and Obama aren't being truthful people. You've got to use common sense Progressives.

Oh so Aipac is dictator of this country huh!  Are you a conspiracy theorist?

BTW, McCain and Giuliani also promise to keep the war going which makes them even more honest than Hillary.  Should we vote for them?

Because this doesn't even make logical sense:

"If George Bush doesn't get us out of Iraq by the election, I will"

Which election? 2012? 2024?

Because no matter how big her polling lead I don't think Bush will just hand over Commander in Chief powers before the 2008 election and absent that there is no content to this sentence at all.

If she really said that, and an earnest discussion thread ensued without noting the central vacuity, then I am scared indeed. Or did I just miss something? The sentence was in bold after all and was the point of departure for the thread, you would think someone previous to me would have noted that in real world terms it makes no sense at all.

"If George Bush doesn't get us out of Iraq by the election, I will"
Exactly how would this work? Color me confused. I think I kind of know what she means but really she is setting a deadline by establishing a starting point and then postdating that.

Not to mention, "If George Bush doesn't get us out of Iraq by the election, I will" is a stupid line because what the next President will do in 2009-10 isn't the issue; it's what Dems should do right now to make sure we get out of Iraq in 2008.

What the line really says is, "I don't mind punting Iraq to the next President."