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Sounds like Mike Gravel was the hero of last night's Democrat candidate debates (I didn't watch--just read the postmortems). Interesting to see the differences between antiwar.com's account, which quotes Gravel's plainspoken words skewering the other candidates, and the New York Times version, which hews to the line that he was the "comic relief" and marginalizes his contributions. Dave, in the comments, said he was a bit dotty but his words certainly aren't. Here's the antiwar.com version.
Gravel...got the issues of war and peace exactly right.
Some of these people [the other candidates] frighten me. When you have mainline candidates that turn around and say "there's nothing off the table with respect to Iran. That's code for using nukes, nuclear devices. I’ve got to tell you, if I'm President of the United States, there will be no preemptive wars with nuclear devices. In my mind, it's immoral, and it’s been immoral for the last 50 years as part of American foreign policy.
Moderator Brian Williams then asked Gravel who on this stage worries him so much. Gravel said the top tier candidates worried him.
Gravel first took aim at Joe Biden:
Joe, you have a certain arrogance, you want to tell the Iraqis how to run their country. We should just play "get out." It's their country, they're asking us to leave, and we insist on staying there, why not get out. You hear the statement, "the soldiers will have died in vain." The entire deaths of Vietnam died in vain. You know what's worse than a soldier dying in vain? More soldiers dying in vain.
Gravel slammed fellow Democrats' approach on continuing to fund the war:
Well, first off, understand that this war was lost the day that George Bush invaded Iraq on a fraudulent basis. Understand that. Now with respect to what’s going on in the Congress, I'm really embarrassed. So we passed – and the media's in a frenzy right today with what has been passed. What has been passed? George Bush communicated over a year ago that he would not get out of Iraq until he left office. Do we not believe him?
Gravel’s alternative:
How do you get out? You pass the law, not a resolution, a law making it a felony to stay there.
Make the illegal war actually illegal. That’s the ticket!
But the best moment came after Barack Obama said that Iran having nuclear weapons will be a major threat to the US: "They are in the process of obtaining nuclear weapons. I don’t think that is disputed by any expert." (At this point, Kucinich interrupted that it is disputed.) Barack continued: "They are the biggest state sponsor of terrorism, with Hezbollah and Hamas." Kucinich continued to interrupt. Obama then talked of the risk of nuclear weapons reaching the hands of terrorists.
Gravel (who happily was next in line) confronted Obama:
We’ve sanctioned them [Iran] for 26 years. We scared the bejesus out of them when the President said they’re "evil." These things don’t work. We need to recognize them.
artist unknown