Have a look at this post over at Steve Soto's place. Apparently, he and some Kossack-types are about to have done with the Democratic Leadership Council and call for total peace:
With the DLC wing and their new mouthpieces Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden sounding a replay of the “we can’t be against the war; Bush will berate us!” 2004 campaign message, there is room as Atrios notes for the rest of the party to move into new and unencumbered territory on Iraq from this point forward. Bush ran and won on Iraq and terror in 2004, but there is a good and bad side to that development. The bad side for the Democrats is that they lost the election. The good side is that with the conclusion of that election Democrats are free to throw off the shackles of that “we can’t leave Iraq” albatross and start anew.There's rumblings throughout the Left half of the blogosphere that the anti-war crowd is preparing to seize its moment and excommunicate the sell-outs, but on the basis that Soto establishes here? Hardly.
First, it may be that Clinton and Biden can actually see a variety of reasons why we should be in Iraq ---all wars ultimately being multi-causal. Maybe they, unlike the execrable John F. Kerry, are the nuanced ones. Biden is especially quick to criticize the execution of the war ---as any fair-minded supporter would in such an important matter--- but he may personally accept the necessity of our use of force in that part of the world to foment these new democratic movements.
Second, there's no obvious political advantage to advocating immediate withdrawal from Iraq ---at least none that any unambiguously anti-war Democrat may claim. That is to say, no one cares whether Turd Kennedy thinks we should cut and run; but people would pay attention if HRC or Biden thought so.
Third, it is an absolute mistake to suppose that Iraq is an irreparable mess. The Coalition and the Iraqi people have achieved a lot in these past two and a half years: deposing the Saddamites, securing countless little liberties that we here take for granted, the January elections in which eight million Iraqis braved death to participate, and now the prospect of a constitution and real democratic form of government. You want to be on the wrong side of that, Steve? You want to abandon what we have begun because we didn't find enough WMD to your liking? I think that's a very irresponsible tack to take. Our men and women didn't sacrifice themselves in such numbers just so that y'all can pretend this is 1968; they sacrificed themselves so that we can insist upon and defend democracy in the middle of a very backwards part of the world ---one that harbors oil and Sulafists and enemies of Christianity and Judaism.
I think you know what Scoop Jackson would say. He'd say that albatrosses don't wear shackles.