In Senate race, sharp differences on war
2006-11-01
Source: Providence Journal
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rss feedSen. Lincoln D. Chafee cast the only Republican vote against a measure to let President Bush use military force in Iraq.
Democratic Senate candidate Sheldon Whitehouse first spoke out against the Iraq war last year after he began his campaign for Chafee's seat. Whitehouse has said he would have voted as Chafee did - against the war measure that passed the Senate with a large bipartisan majority four years ago.
Behind this appearance of agreement on the leading issue of this election year, Chafee and Whitehouse differ sharply on key aspects of the war. They attack each other even more sharply.
Whitehouse accuses Chafee of being "extremely quiet" on the war and of seeming to be "satisfied" to have Donald H. Rumsfeld as secretary of defense.
Chafee says Whitehouse's long silence on the war suggests that - like such Democrats as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York - Whitehouse might have been an early supporter. He accuses Whitehouse of "flip-flopping" in his on-and-off embrace of hard deadlines for bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq.
In an interview last week, Whitehouse said he did not speak out against the war in 2002 because "it was not an issue" in his race for governor that year. He said he spoke out "when people took an interest in what I had to say" after he became a Senate candidate in the spring of 2005. Whitehouse said he has since held a consistent, three-point position: the president should "announce that we are going to get the troops out"; the military should execute the withdrawal; and the United States should step up diplomacy during the withdrawal to solve the problems in Iraq.
A look at the record shows that Whitehouse did call in 2005 for a "rapid and responsible" withdrawal from Iraq. But he has also supported - and later backed away from - detailed prescriptions about when and how the United States should get out of Iraq.
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