Hawkish doves

With Washington working itself into a lather of excitement over the Democratic primary in Connecticut, it worth taking a moment to think about what a Joe Lieberman loss might actually mean for foreign policy platforms.  

If Lieberman loses it will be seen as a sign of how Iraq has enraged the base. That will mean it’s a safe bet that ’08ers will aim to put even more distance between themselves and the war. Those who initially supported the war are abasing themselves completely to persuade the anti-war activists that they are truly penitent. So, John Kerry now wants all American forces home within a year. Not to be outdone, his old running mate John Edwards told an audience in New Hampshire this weekend that the United States should pull 40,000 troops out now.

The big question is what will Hillary Clinton do? She voted for the war but has adeptly criticized the management of it. Yet, it remains to be seen if that will be enough to placate the base. The problem for Hillary is that if she does recant on Iraq, it will be used by her opponents to imply that she isn’t tough enough to be commander in chief. One possible solution would be for her to come up with a tough sounding reason for withdrawal. She could argue that the troop presence in Iraq limits American options for dealing with Iran and so, to make military threats against Tehran credible, the United States must pull out. 

The irony of all this is that those Democrats who opposed the war from the off, like Al Gore and Barack Obama, have a lot more wiggle room. Al Gore has refused to endorse a deadline, saying “[i]t’s possible that setting a deadline could set in motion forces that would make it even worse,” and Obama came out swinging this summer against the Kerry amendment:

We must exit Iraq, but not in a way that leaves behind a security vacuum filled with terrorism, chaos, ethnic cleansing and genocide that could engulf large swaths of the Middle East and endanger America. We have both moral and national security reasons to manage our exit in a responsible way.”

So, we could have a bizarre situation in 2008 where the early doves end up as the most hawkish Democratic candidates.