Sorry, Hillary, this is NOT good enough

That she's correct about what she said doesn't change the fact that it sounds appallingly opportunistic:

Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday that President Bush should withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq before he leaves office, asserting it would be "the height of irresponsibility" to pass the war along to the next commander in chief.

"This was his decision to go to war with an ill-conceived plan and an incompetently executed strategy," the Democratic senator from New York said her in initial presidential campaign swing through Iowa.

"We expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office" in January 2009, the former first lady said.

The White House condemned Clinton's comments as a partisan attack that undermines U.S. soldiers

Let's ignore the whiny-ass titty baby kvetching of an administration that has claimed that every criticism of anything it does "emboldens the enemy." Let's look instead at what Hillary is saying. She's absolutely right, of course, that the Bush strategy of running out the clock and continuing the Crawford Caligula's pattern of screwing up everything he touches and then leaving the mess for someone else to clean up is appalling. However, if she thinks that demanding a timetable for withdrawal by the end of the current administration somehow negates her vote for the war, she'd better guess again, as far as I'm concerned. Let's not be blinded by this and think that this is a change in her "invading Iraq was the right thing to do, it was just planned and executed badly" viewpoint. Do not be fooled. She is still a war hawk, and these times demand more courage than the kind of triangulation that may have worked well enough during the 1990's indicates.

The situation can change radically by November 2008, but right now she is well-positioned to take the Democratic nomination, whether a majority of Americans would vote for her in a general election or not. And this is NOT what I want to hear from the party's likely nominee.

John Aravosis disagrees:

My initial reaction is: smart move. The overwhelming majority of Americans have had it with this war. They want us out - just not yet. Yes, it's a contradiction, I get it, but they don't, and it's where they are. People want the war over "soon." And Hillary just gave the public a timeline that meets what their gut is telling them.

It also puts Bush on notice that the clock is ticking. He no longer gets to pull the old "this war will have to be settled by the next president." Hillary's message for the next two years is going to be "are we there yet?" And it's a smart message for the Democrats as well. It permits them to keep running against Bush even as the elections approach for the post-Bush.

The only danger with this strategy is were it morphed into a "Bush has two more years to fix things, so let's just escalate and see what happens." No one is for that, and that's not what Hillary is saying, in any case. She's saying that even she, Democrat who has often been a pain in the butt (to us) as it concerns her views on the war, has a limit.

Here's the problem with Hillary's so-called "timetable": It essentially asks for the war to be ended in time for her to presumably take office -- but does not take into account a temporary escalation and the lives of the thousands more American soldiers that will be lost while we wait for Bush to clean up the mess. Whom does waiting benefit, other than the next president? It certainly doesn't benefit the American people, who are going to pay for another year and a half of war profiteering on the part of Bush and Cheney's friends and cronies. It doesn't benefit the troops who will be at risk for loss of life or limb for another year and a half. And it doesn't seem to benefit the so-called Iraqi military, who somehow miraculously, after foundering for four years, got its act together at least for a day right when George W. Bush needed them to most.

Hillary Clinton's call for an end to our presence in Iraq not now, but before SHE can take office, is exactly the kind of policy position, driven not by the pulse of the American people who marched on Washington on Saturday and the many others who weren't there but were in solidarity, but by the Washington consultant corps -- the Bob Shrums and Al Froms and craven "centrist" Democrats like Chuck "Let's try to do it halfway" Schumer, that is the LAST thing we need. The next president is going to have to have one hell of a mess to deal with -- and this sort of blithe willingness to sacrifice more Americans in a lost cause is disturbing on a potential nominee who is supposed to represent an alternative.