Quotable: U.S. troops won’t be “apartheid cops” in Iraq

I just came back from a talk at the Brookings Institution by Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2008.

Biden said a lot of interesting things in his talk, but perhaps the most colorful wasn’t in the prepared remarks (pdf). During the questions period, he said that U.S. combat forces must leave Iraq by 2008 in order to make it clear to the Iraqis that we won’t stick around as “apartheid cops.”

Also newsworthy: Biden announced that he’s working on legislation to repeal the 2002 Congressional authorization that allowed President Bush to send troops, calling it “no longer relevant to the situation in Iraq.” He said it should be replaced with “a much narrower mission statement.”

Biden’s overall message was that the United States needs to “get out of Iraq with our interests intact,” and that his plan was the best way to do that. Taking a page from President Bush’s playbook, he ended his talk with a challenge to potential critics: “What is your alternative?”