Just another step in the left’s push to trivialize reports from Iraq by officials like General Petraeus and push for defeat in the war anyway.

CORAL GABLES, Fla. - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton insisted Sunday night that it’s time to start pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq as she and her rivals for the Democratic prresidential nomination debated the war anew on the eve of a much-awaited asssessment by U.S. commanding Gen. David Petraeus.

But hey, at least she didn’t rhyme Petraeus’ name with “betray us.”

What’s almost sort of sickening, though, is the way the Democrat candidate are all trying to out-withdraw one another.  Bill Richardson tried to one-up Hillary by saying that he’d withdraw all of the troops in months:

In the first presidential debate ever broadcast in Spanish, Clinton primary campaign rival Bill Richardson challenged her to get each and every U.S. soldier out — not just some of them.

“I’d bring them all home within six to eight months,” Richardson said in the debate which took place in south Florida and was broadcast on Univision, the nation’s largest Spanish-language network. “There is a basic difference between all of us here ... This is a fundamental issue.”

A withdrawal in months, despite the fact that every serious observer of Iraq agrees that such a precipitous withdrawal would abandon Iraq to chaos and bloodshed much worse than what we’re seeing now.  Despite the Iraqi government’s call for a long-term US presence in Iraq and permanent bases.

Hillary herself agreed that there is “no military solution” in Iraq.

Clinton said that a report being presented in Washington by Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker this week won’t change the basic problem that there is no military solution in Iraq.

“I believe we should start bringing our troops home,” she said. “We need to quit refereeing their civil war and bring our troops home as soon as possible.”

What I don’t get is why any American would want us to withdraw completely from Iraq.  One of the benefits of invading is the eventual establishment of permanent bases in Iraq, which is (as I’m sure you all know) in the middle of a socially and politically unstable region which is boiling over terror threats onto the rest of the world.  I can understand arguments calling for the building of those bases and the draw-down of troops into them leaving Iraqi security forces in the lead, but to abandon Iraq completely?

That would be foolhardy.