Some
interesting thoughts from the supposed "wild anti-war liberal" Dean. Shows again that the media sticks with its caricatures regardless of the truth and also reveals AGAIN that Dean is a serious politician who doesn't shy away from the complexities of an issue.
Dean's appearance yesterday in Minneapolis was interesting on a number of grounds, not least the fact that he drew 1,000 people to hear him speak. When was the last time one of our party chairmen drew anybody to hear them speak other than millionaires with open checkbooks?
Dean's anti-withdrawal position also puts him squarely on the Hillary side of the debate over the "withdraw now (or extremely soon) side led by Ted Kennedy. This may have interesting implications as we head into the next presidential election.
Howard Dean warns of danger in Iraq pullout
Conrad Defiebre, Star Tribune
April 21, 2005
Howard Dean came to Minnesota Wednesday evening without the scream that ended his 2004 presidential campaign, or the anti-Iraq war rhetoric that started it.
"Now that we're there, we're there and we can't get out," he told an audience of nearly 1,000 at the Minneapolis Convention Center. "The president has created an enormous security problem for the United States where none existed before. But I hope the president is incredibly successful with his policy now that he's there."
An American pullout could endanger the United States in any of three ways, Dean said: by leaving a Shiite theocracy worse than that in Iran, which he called a more serious threat than Iraq ever was; by creating an independent Kurdistan in the north, with destabilizing effects on neighboring Kurdish regions of Turkey, Iran and Syria, and by making the Sunni Triangle a magnet for Islamic terrorists similar to the former Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. "That's where Al Qaida will set up," he said.
Here again is proof that Howard Dean is not a man who can be easily pigeon-holed politically. We're fortunate that a man of his ability is leading us and, I predict, he will take us to happier destinations than we ever visited when Terry McAuliffe was our tour guide-in-chief.