Let me start this week with a quote from the campaign trail:

“President Bush thinks we should stay in Iraq forever, as far as the eye can see. He’s said it himself. He says, ‘Getting out of Iraq is up to presidents who come after me.’ That means no change until the spring of 2009 at the earliest.

“I don’t agree. That’s too long. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get our troops out of Iraq in six months or even a year, but I want to start working on getting them home as soon as I get into office. Staying in Iraq for at least three more years is too long.

“My opponent in this race is with President Bush on this. More of a blank check. I disagree.

“We’ve got too many challenges around the world to keep burning through money and our men and women in uniform just because President Bush can’t admit that his policies aren’t working.”

Do you know which Democrat said those words last week? As far as I know, not one of them. Or anything like it. But why not?

There may be other things to say about Iraq on the campaign trail this year, but the Democrats shouldn’t get bogged down in discussions of precise timelines or arriving at one unified position not only when the president’s war is overwhelmingly unpopular but when he’s staked out a public position that is light-years away from where the public is on Iraq and where it wants to go.

The president has repeatedly said that U.S. troops will remain in Iraq through the rest of his presidency and that getting out of Iraq will be up to future presidents. That’s a concrete and tangible statement, and in practice it means at least three more years of a major U.S. troop presence in Iraq. That’s wildly out of line with where the country is. And virtually every Republican in Congress has signed on to that position, either through a formal vote or through statements to the press.

Over the past week, the papers have been filled with stories to the effect that Republicans are trying to seize the offensive on Iraq in the election-year political debate. But that’s a dodge. The war is dismally unpopular, and on that basic judgment opinions are largely congealed and fast congealing.

The White House knows that. What the White House is doing is trying to knock the opposition off its stride and scare opponents out of their own offensive, which is to hold the administration accountable and press for a change of direction on Iraq.

Yes, the White House is going to try to call any change of direction “cut and run.” That’s their angle. That’s their card. If Democrats can’t stand in the debate in the face of that, far better to leave all foreign policy entirely off the table and contest the election on minimum wage or college loans.

On the surface, the debate about how long American troops will remain in Iraq is one of timing and calendars. But it’s actually more than that. It’s about policy. More specifically, it’s about whether we have a policy and whether it’s working.

In policy terms, saying we plan to stay in Iraq indefinitely is just another way of saying that we don’t have a policy. Having a policy would mean having a concrete sense of what the policy is, what things will happen to know whether it’s working and when we think these benchmark events will happen.

Plans have to be revised, of course. Timelines are revised. But saying we plan to stay in Iraq indefinitely is simply another way of saying we’re going to keep on with the current policy, which clearly isn’t working, in the hope that at some unspecified point in the future it will start working.

Let’s face it: The president’s goal is to keep everything in place until 2009 so that he can leave his mess to someone else. It’s not the 2,500 dead that have turned the public against the president. It’s that the president doesn’t know what he doing and is either unable or unwilling to change course. The point of the “debate” is to get Democrats to run from the issue itself, thus signaling their lack of “toughness” on Iraq through their lack of toughness in domestic political debate.

The president has given his opponents an albatross to hang about his neck and the necks of all those who have blindly supported him. So why not use it? On this count, Democrats really do have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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