Good for her. From AP:
President Bush should withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq before he leaves office, asserting it would be "the height of irresponsibility" to pass the war along to the next commander in chief.My initial reaction is: smart move. The overwhelming majority of Americans have had it with this war. They want us out - just not yet. Yes, it's a contradiction, I get it, but they don't, and it's where they are. People want the war over "soon." And Hillary just gave the public a timeline that meets what their gut is telling them.
"This was his decision to go to war with an ill-conceived plan and an incompetently executed strategy," the Democratic senator from New York said her in initial presidential campaign swing through Iowa.
"We expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office" in January 2009, the former first lady said.
It also puts Bush on notice that the clock is ticking. He no longer gets to pull the old "this war will have to be settled by the next president." Hillary's message for the next two years is going to be "are we there yet?" And it's a smart message for the Democrats as well. It permits them to keep running against Bush even as the elections approach for the post-Bush.
The only danger with this strategy is were it morphed into a "Bush has two more years to fix things, so let's just escalate and see what happens." No one is for that, and that's not what Hillary is saying, in any case. She's saying that even she, Democrat who has often been a pain in the butt (to us) as it concerns her views on the war, has a limit.
So, Hillary is now in favor of a timetable for withdrawal. It's a timetable the American people will readily accept, in my view. And that's a good thing.
