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Wednesday, April 11, 2007

The MoveOn Town Hall (Updated)

MoveOn just sponsored an interesting Town Hall discussion of Iraq by the current crop of Presidential candidates (Republicans prefer the safety of their Pravda, Fox, and were, of course, nowheresville -- as they will likewise be come Election Day), and in the aftermath MoveOn asked members which candidate they were most pleased with in a poll.

I am still supporting John Edwards for the Presidency, but Bill Richardson's repudiation of residual forces in Iraq seemed to me the most honest and credible anti-war stance and so he got my vote on this particular poll.

To endorse an abiding troop presence in Iraq or, worse, bases (and even "temporary" bases amount to permanent ones if we don't leave them) while claiming to intend to end the war is, frankly, dishonest, incoherent, and out of touch.

It is our job to pressure our current favorite candidates (mine, again, is still John Edwards for now) to a more consistent and honest stance like Richardson's on this key question. That pressure is one of the forms our support should take in a democracy. We should not just reward our candidates with kudos and cash when they do good things (as I have rewarded Edwards for his forthright refusals to legitimize the Fox's corporate-militarist-theocratic noise machine as if it were a news outlet, and for his righteous support of lesbian and gay citizens like me, and for his ongoing support of unions and denunciations of the violence of poverty in America) but talk back and remind them who the employer at the end of this long job interview is going to be whenever they haven't found their way as yet to the proper positions (as I let my candidate Edwards know that I am unhappy about the way some of his "tough talk" on Iran plays into the hands of the disgusting militarist exceptionalist unilateralist drum beat for catastrophic war spewing forth from the Killer Clown Administration at the moment).

Update: The Edwards Campaign has already clarified their position in letters sent to dKos, MyDD and similar places, very much for the better.
When we say complete withdrawal we mean it. No more war. No combat troops in the country. Period. But we're also being honest. If John Edwards is president, we're not going to leave the American Embassy in Iraq as the only undefended embassy in the world, for example. There will be Marine guards there, just like there are at our embassies in London, Riyadh, and Tokyo . And just the same, if American civilians are providing humanitarian relief to the Iraqi people, we're going to protect them. How in good conscience could we refuse to protect them and then allow humanitarian workers to be at risk for their lives or the work not to happen at all? Finally, it's also Senator Edwards' position that we will have troops in the region to prevent the sectarian violence in Iraq from spilling over into other countries, for counter-terrorism, or to prevent a genocide. But in the region means in the region - for example, existing bases like Kuwait, naval presence in the Persian Gulf , and so forth. I hope this helps explain Senator Edwards' position. Thanks for standing up for what we all believe in.

I like the first part better than the second part, and have quibbles certainly (I'm an anti-war socialist-feminist queer vegetarian radical democrat theoryhead, for heaven's sake -- of course I'm gonna have quibbles), but this is rather more like it.

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