Clinton's the One!

Reading the news accounts in recent days of Senator Hillary Clinton vowing to end the war in Iraq ("It takes more than a village idiot," Clinton was heard to mutter under her breath after the announcement), I was seized with a sense of deja vu. A vow to end the war ... where had I heard that before ...?

Then it came to me -- Clinton is taking her cue from .... drum roll, please -- Richard Nixon. Yes! Richard F. Nixon, or Nick Dixon as Dwight Eisenhower is said to have called him (OK, it was Richard M., as in Milhous, his mother's maiden name if I recall, but I'm trying to be subtly vulgar).

A crucial difference, however -- Nixon was unwilling to turn tail from Vietnam in a hurry, thereby hastening the bloodbath that eventually followed there and in neighboring Cambodia when the communists seized control in 1975.

No, what's most important to Democrats, and Clinton exemplifies this, is that the war in Iraq be remembered as Bush's War, and that it not be remembered as a success. That's not the same as saying Democrats want us to lose -- we didn't "win" or "lose" the Korean War either, for that matter (and speaking of Eisenhower, Clinton and others in the presidential race have him as precedent here, with Nixon as Ike's VP).

But from this observer's perspective, it's clear that Democrats want this war to end in a draw rather than American victory.