The war in Iraq was predicated on protecting the US from attack by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction. The mission statement on Cindy Sheehan’s Meet with Cindy site states (emphasis added):
Our mission is to persuade President Bush to meet with Cindy Sheehan and answer her questions about why the war that took her son’s life was started and why it is being continued.
I’m all for Ms. Sheehan’s getting up in the nose of George W. Bush. I don’t think he could answer her questions even if he deigned to meet with her.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of Democrats–even some who can string more than three words together without resorting to that whipped-dog whine W affects when he’s having trouble remembering how to end a sentence–who couldn’t do that, either.
This exchange is from Meet the Press yesterday, with guest host Andrea Mitchell talking to Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE):
MS. MITCHELL: Let me show you a recent poll of how the American people now view the situation in Iraq. The CNN-Gallup Poll says that only 34 percent now feel that it has made us safer. Fifty-seven percent feels it’s made us less safer. The president in his radio speech yesterday said that we’re fighting this war in Iraq as part of a global war on terror and we’re fighting there so we don’t have to fight them at home. Is the homeland safer because of the war in Iraq?
SEN. BIDEN: We’re all better off Saddam is gone, but I–this is an example once again where the American people are brighter than their leaders, they’re smarter than their leaders. They understand fully that what’s happened is it has become a training ground. There’s actually some evidence when I was there back in–Memorial Day that not only are these jihadists coming in and fighting and getting trained on the job, that they’re also after being trained being exported to Europe and other parts of the world. So the fact of the matter is we have not become safer from terrorists as a consequence of this, but the irony is unless we now finish the job, we will be considerably less safe than we were before and that’s why we must stay in order to try to put a government in place that has the capacity to, in fact, secure its own country.
Biden doesn’t explain how “the homeland is safer because of the war in Iraq,” a war that he supported. He doesn’t explain how “We’re all better off Saddam is gone,” which just seems ludicrous given that we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars just to destabilize a broken-down Third World country. He evades the question and moves on to his “finish the job” speech.
I don’t think Biden should be doing Bush’s job for him explaining why the war was started–I don’t really think he can. But so long as he and others in the Democratic leadership continue to say anything but an unequivocal “No” to the question Mitchell posed, they’ve got the same looming credibility problem on the war that Bush has. And that’s not going to get any better by the 2006 elections.