In Georgetown’s first glimpse of the 2008 presidential election, candidate and Gov. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.) emphasized his call for immediate U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq.
The first speaker in Georgetown’s 2008 Presidential Candidate Lecture Series, Richardson outlined his evacuation plan for U.S. troops in Iraq, a means to end what he described as a “cycle of violence.”
“Ninety-three percent of Sunnis and over half the Shia think it’s OK to shoot at an American soldier,” Richardson said, describing what he saw as the extent to which the Iraqis want the American troops out of their country.
Richardson said he believed the war in Iraq could have been avoided if President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had listened to others’ calls for “greater diplomacy and more patience” before committing troops in 2003.
Richardson criticized the “reckless incompetence of our civilian leadership,” and the persistent pursuit of a “strategy that has failed week after week, month after month, year after year” in Iraq.
In addition to criticizing what he considered the president’s “wrong-headed” approach to U.S. relations with Iraq and Iran, Richardson said that Democratic front-runners do not understand the immediacy for U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), who have each polled ahead of Richardson for the Democratic nomination, have not called for immediate withdrawal as Richardson has.
“If you haven’t seen enough to know that we need to get all the troops out then you aren’t watching the same war that I and the rest of America are seeing,” he said. “I am opposed to five years or nine years or any more years of our troops dying. My colleagues are wrong.”
Richardson compared the “slow, protracted exit” suggested by other candidates to former President Richard Nixon’s withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. He called for an immediate evacuation of all troops, an end to the war that has caused the United States to “have lost credibility … lost the leadership … [and] confused our moral compass.”
Richardson also suggested using military and economic power in conjunction with diplomacy to improve the United States’ standing in the international community. He said the U.S. can regain lost respect and credibility by shutting down Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, eliminating secret prisons, putting a stop to unwarranted “eavesdropping on citizens,” ending torture and committing to ending human rights crises in places such as Darfur, Myanmar and Zimbabwe.
Richardson added that the restoration of U.S. international prestige requires a strong military with modern weaponry, better training and a more extensive benefits package for soldiers. He detailed a re-budgeting effort that includes a $57 billion cut in Pentagon spending.
Richardson appealed to the students in the audience by detailing his higher education financing plan; he said he wants to implement a program in which one year of service in a national organization would be rewarded with two years of university tuition.
When asked by Alexander Hart (SFS ’10) in the question-and-answer period following the speech whether he would be willing to run for vice president with any of the candidates whom he criticized if they were given the Democratic ticket, Richardson replied, “No. I’m going to win this nomination.”
The speech was sponsored by the Lecture Fund.