SAINT PAUL [9/9/08] – U.S. Senate Candidate Al Franken:

George W. Bush and Norm Coleman still have no plan to bring home the 140,000 troops who will be left in Iraq when this President leaves office. They still have no plan to root out and incapacitate the people who hit us on 9/11. They still have no plan to finish the job in Afghanistan. This is the same “stay the course” policy in a different package.

We can’t keep staying the course with a failed policy. We can’t keep spending $10 billion a month in Iraq while the Maliki government builds a $50 billion surplus. We can’t keep substituting the latest Bush talking points for a real plan for re-deployment. We can’t keep ignoring the very real possibility that our gains in Afghanistan could be erased and the very real threat posed by a reconstituted al Qaeda in Pakistan. And we can’t keep 140,000 troops in Iraq with no plan to end our military engagement there.

When I get to Washington, I’ll fight to bring an end to this war. Make no mistake: I’m not for a precipitous withdrawal. But the only leverage we have is to let the Iraqis and other regional powers know that this is not an open-ended commitment by declaring a timetable to end it. Only then will we be able to jump-start diplomacy.

We need a change of course in Iraq. And if we want that, it is now more clear than ever before that we need to start by making a change in Washington.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 4:23 pm and is filed under From Al's Desk, Press Releases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.