“I just remind everybody,” Feingold said in New Hampshire this weekend, “Democrats were in the majority in the United States Senate when we voted for the Iraq war and we passed the USA Patriot Act. It’s not enough to be just in the majority. You have to stand for something.”
The New Republic’s Michael Crowley says, “Feingold may emerge as the only 2008 Democratic candidate who voted against the Iraq war: Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Evan Bayh all supported the 2002 war resolution, while governors Tom Vilsack of Iowa and Mark Warner of Virginia are hawkish-sounding centrists.”
This weekend Feingold said what so many Americans are waiting to hear… “Why are so many Democrats too timid to say what everyone in America knows? It’s time to redeploy the troops. It’s time to bring the troops out of Iraq. I say bring them home by the end of the year.”
Crowley explains why… “Feingold has not called for the United States to get out of Iraq “right now.” But he is the only major congressional Democrat to set a specific withdrawal timetable. The impetus for his proposal was a trip he took to Iraq in February with a small Senate delegation that included, of all people, Hillary Clinton. Feingold had never visited Iraq before, and he was appalled by what he saw there. “We couldn’t stay overnight in Iraq,” he said recently. “We couldn’t drive from the airport to the Green Zone. When we went to the Green Zone, the helicopters had to go just over the palm trees so they wouldn’t get shot down. We never got to go out to see the rest of Baghdad, because they couldn’t take us out safely. We wore flak jackets and helmets in the Green Zone. And people are worried about chaos if we leave?”
