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QuirtEvans
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Jul 22 2008, 04:00 AM
Post #1
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I Owe It All To John D'Oh
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Jack Reed Gives Obama Cover on Iraq July 22, 2008; Page A2
If you were to construct the ideal Democrat to engage Republicans in debate over Iraq, he might look something like this:
He would be a military veteran with real experience, maybe even a West Point man. He would have opposed the war against Iraq originally, and maybe even have cast a vote against the war to prove it. But since then, he would have devoted himself to making the exercise a success, becoming an expert on U.S. policy and what is happening on the ground. As a West Point grad and a former Army paratrooper, Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island has "the perfect profile to engage Republicans" on Iraq. WSJ's Jerry Seib explains.
Hey, wait. There is just such a Democrat out there. He is Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island. And he was at Sen. Barack Obama's side Monday touring around Baghdad. All of which raises an intriguing question: Is there a chance he also could be at Sen. Obama's side as vice-presidential running mate?
The question isn't out of bounds because Sen. Reed, even more than Sen. Obama, has helped shape the mainstream Democratic position on Iraq. And unlike Sen. Obama, he has done so with a background of personal experience, and with the benefit of a hefty investment of time on the ground in Iraq. Indeed, this week's trip is Sen. Obama's second to Iraq; it is Sen. Reed's 12th.
Sen. Reed has done all this while remaining relatively unknown, which is a shame because he has a uniquely American story to tell, much as Barack Obama and John McCain do.
Jack Reed was born in Cranston, R.I., son of a school-janitor father and a factory-worker mother. The father worked his way up the school-system ladder, while the son won himself an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, from which he graduated in 1971.
From there, he became an Army Ranger and an officer in the 82nd Airborne. He resigned as an Army captain in 1979 and moved on to get a Harvard law degree. He was elected to the House in 1990 and moved up to the Senate in 1996.
He has been mostly a reliable liberal on domestic issues and a low-profile player on defense issues. Slight of build and unpretentious in manner, he has never been a high-profile player.
But he began to stand out on Iraq when he was one of 21 Democrats to vote against a resolution authorizing use of force in 2002. Once the war began, though, he adjusted, pushing for more funding for the conflict, and specifically money to ease the strains on his old service, the Army.
He also began a series of regular trips to Iraq, noteworthy for their emphasis on getting out of the protective bubble in Baghdad and into the field for interviews with Army officers, some of whom he knows from his own Army days. After each trip, he composes a lengthy written report and circulates several hundred copies to members of Congress and Army officers. What has emerged from all this has been an intense focus on changing the role U.S. troops are playing in Iraq. He has been more cautious on an Iraq withdrawal than has Sen. Obama. While Sen. Obama has, as a presidential candidate, declared that he would start a withdrawal immediately and complete it within 16 months, Sen. Reed hasn't adopted that fixed timetable as his position.
Instead, his efforts in the Senate have focused on pushing repeatedly, in an amendment he sponsors with Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, to change the mission for U.S. troops from combat and security to counterterrorism and training. That amendment has been offered in various forms, and in one version called for making this change in mission within nine months, but has focused more on the mission and a phased withdrawal than on a timetable.
Two other consistent themes run through the Reed critique on Iraq. The first has been that political changes by the Iraqi government were more important than military progress. And the second has been concern for the strains a drawn-out conflict are putting on his beloved Army. Like Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, another former ground-combat man and Sen. Obama's other traveling companion this week, that concern reflects the Army grunt's view of war.
Sen. Reed hasn't always been right on Iraq. The report he wrote after a visit to Iraq this past January appears, in retrospect, too downbeat on the prospects for President Bush's troop surge. But he has clearly influenced Sen. Obama. Among other things, he advised him that a good way to get some unfiltered information about what is happening on the ground is to talk to junior officers and to journalists on the scene, both of which Sen. Obama has done.
The tantalizing question is whether any of this might translate into a vice-presidential bid. It doesn't seem highly likely. In electoral-college terms, Sen. Reed would deliver exactly nothing. His home state of Rhode Island is already reliably Democratic, having gone that way in every presidential election since 1984. And Sen. Reed isn't well-known around the nation.
But he does offer genuine national-security credentials and a similar view on Iraq, one rooted in personal and professional expertise. And for a candidate with Sen. Obama's profile, short as it is on personal experience on national security, those wouldn't be bad things to have around.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1216676377...us_inside_today
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