Democrats seek to seize initiative on Iraq

Eight Democratic candidates argued over who was the toughest opponent of the war in Iraq as they plunged the nation into the longest presidential campaign in its history Thursday night.

The first debate of the 2008 campaign came on the same day that the Senate joined the House in voting to require the start of troop withdrawals by Oct. 1, setting Congress on the road to a showdown with President Bush, who has promised to veto the measure.

“The Congress has spoken, and now all we can hope is the president will listen,” said Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Clinton defended her initial vote to approve the U.S. invasion of Iraq, saying she did the best she could with the information she was given at the time. “If I knew then what I know now, I would not have voted that way,” she said, insisting that “the question is, what do we do now?”

“If this president does not get us out of Iraq, when I’m president I will,” she said.

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois likewise defended his votes to fund the effort in Iraq but said that should not be interpreted as support for the military campaign.

“I opposed this war from the start because I thought it would lead to the disastrous conditions that we have seen,” he said, but he said he could not vote to cut off funding for troops once they were in the field.

Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate in 2004, argued that before the United States could restore its credibility in Iraq and elsewhere, it first had to repair what he called a rupture between the presidency and the American people.

“It is impossible for the United States of America to provide the stability and the leadership in the world unless first the American people trust their president,” he said.

Door could open to alternatives
The format of the debate, which was aired on MSNBC-TV and streamed live on MSNBC.com, worked against the development of an extended discussion on any one topic. The eight candidates were given one minute apiece to answer questions on a variety of topics, with tightly limited rebuttals and no opening or closing statements.

David Axelrod, senior strategist for the Obama campaign, called the event a “drive-by” and complained that it was difficult “to really have thoughtful dialogue on a lot of issues.”

Nonetheless, the Democrats pointed to the 90-minute debate at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg as an opportunity to frame the national discussion over how to get U.S. forces out of Iraq before their Republican rivals could weigh in next week in their first debate.

For Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and former Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska, the debate was a chance to set themselves apart from the pack on the war, which both have opposed almost from the beginning. A poll by NBC affiliate WIS-TV of Columbia and Communities for Quality Education found the war to be far and away the No. 1 issue for state Democrats.

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Kucinich disagreed with Obama that it was reasonable for lawmakers to pay for a war if they disagreed with it.

“I think it’s inconsistent to tell the American people you oppose the war but you vote to fund it,” he said. “The Democrats have the power to end the war right now, and that’s what they should do.”

Gravel called on Congress to pass a law making it a felony to keep troops in Iraq, charging that “this war in Iraq was lost the second George W. Bush invaded Iraq under a fraudulent basis.”

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, essentially agreed, saying that “this war is a disaster; we must end this war” and that if he were president, he would withdraw all U.S. troops by the end of the calendar year.

Afterward, he told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann that he favored a congressional measure to “de-authorize” the war, even though such a move would likely face a court challenge under the War Powers Act of 1973.

The others in the debate were Sens. Joseph Biden of Delaware, who called for the United States to decentralize its control of Iraq and share the nation’s oil wealth, and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, who advocated a more restrained approach of sending no more troops to Iraq.

“The policy has failed and we need a new strategy if we’re to have any hope of stabilizing Iraq,” Dodd said afterward in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.

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