Short of a miracle for Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) this coming Tuesday, it now seems all but inevitable that the upcoming election will boil down to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz).
In a refreshing respite from the current condition of American politics, these senators have much in common despite their party affiliations. They share an eagerness to reach across the partisan aisle to create solutions, as evidenced by eponymous legislation such as the Obama-Lugar and McCain-Feingold bills.
Both senators focus on cleaning up Washington by cutting the ties of special interest groups that constrain and suffocate our politics. Both are concerned with the environment; for the first time, voters will see both candidates compete to "out-green" each other. Both agree that the United States should not have torture as an official state policy, and both agree that wiretapping must be very carefully wielded as a state instrument.
No such consensus, however, appears with respect to Iraq; on this issue, the candidates stand as polar opposites. McCain backed Bush's war from the beginning. He believed it honorable for the United States to impose a democratizing mission on a sovereign nation. He even criticized Bush over the current administration's mismanagement of the war. The Arizona senator wanted more troops and is as ashamed as anyone else of the incompetence that has wreaked disaster on the promise of victory.
Yet today he still stands as a vehement war hawk, believing that withdrawal will ruin America's integrity and its image. He asks Americans to prepare for an occupation that may stretch - according to his own estimates - hundreds of years.
Obama, on the other hand, completely opposed the war from the time he was an Illinois state senator. He stood before massive crowds in 2002 and presciently explained that the Iraq war was a rash, ideological impulse from the upper reaches of the administration - one that was sure to fatten the recruitment ranks of al-Qaeda, strengthen Iran's comparative presence in the region and ruin America's moral reputation. Throughout the course of the war, Obama has witnessed his terrible vision unfold and now advocates a cautious withdrawal from what he sees as a quagmire.
But from this historical vantage point, we cannot declare either Obama's or McCain's plan as objectively best. In hindsight, we can say that both the idea of the war itself and its botched handling have caused adverse consequences for the United States vis-? -vis the rest of the world and brought unexpected changes to the geopolitical map of the Middle East. But we simply do not know what kind of chaos might be unleashed if we leave. Perhaps the longer we remain entrenched in Iraq, the safer and more stable it might be.
However, we also do not know what kind of progress we might be holding back by staying. As the current Iraqi political deadlock over oil allocation attests, our occupation is barring real political development. This organic process is frozen in time until we leave.
Is our country - including both our soldiers and their families - as eager as McCain to serve as Iraq's political glue for hundreds of years? Or are we ready to come home at the possible cost of future instability to the region?
A Rasmussen poll released on Feb. 19 indicated that 61 percent of Americans would like to see U.S. troops brought home from Iraq within a year, up from 59 percent two weeks before. Only 34 percent want our troops to hold out in Iraq until the mission is accomplished - down two points from a week before.
These are threatening numbers for Sen. McCain. He may represent the more flexible face of the Republican party (one which some of the party itself has been loathe to accept), but his stance on the war is at least as hard-line as Bush's and stands to do no better in the polls.
Senator Obama's position on the war, on the other hand, is utterly transformative. He plans to not just withdraw our troops from Iraq to re-focus on fighting al-Qaeda remnants on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, but more importantly, to change the mindset that got us into this war.
Obama rejects the idea that America can grow stronger and safer by launching unilateral wars of choice, particularly into countries with bitter and relatively recent colonial histories. He refutes the very idea that it is in America's national interest to occupy a country such as Iraq in order to re-structure it as a mirror image of secular American market democracy.
McCain, on the other hand, has argued that not only was this mindset appropriate, but it was not acted upon as aggressively as it should have been. Today he would essentially take up the reigns from Bush and drive us with more intensity down our current course.
As these two contenders press toward November, the election will - overtly or otherwise - develop into our referendum on the war. In a broader sense, it will also reflect our desire for a new way of thinking versus our desire for, at best, a more efficient status quo.
Alex Gladstein is a senior majoring in international relations and Middle Eastern studies.
