Brave Sir Robin Demands Run-Away Date

Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton accompanied Joe Lieberman on his fact-finding trip to Iraq, after Dayton petulantly demanded that someone take him there. Dayton managed to sound a bit more coherent on this trip, echoing Lieberman’s call to stay the course on the scheduled January elections. However, he still took the opportunity to demand a schedule for our withdrawal:

Wrapping up a trip to Iraq, Sen. Mark Dayton said he’s convinced the United States must take efforts to quicken Iraq’s self-sufficiency.
“That process needs to be accelerated,” Dayton, D-Minn., told reporters in a conference call from Israel Wednesday, after spending the day in Iraq meeting with U.S. troops and U.N. and Iraqi officials.
“We’ve been there for 18 months now … We’ve got to start to define the remaining amount of time necessary for our forces to be there before they can leave with a victory secured.”

Once again, Dayton displays his utter incomprehension of our efforts in Iraq. The point of our mission isn’t to set up an exit date and then get done as much as we can before then; it’s to establish a functioning, democratic, federal government and establish a stable security force to keep it safe. Instead of focusing on making sure we succeed at that mission, Brave Sir Dayton worries that we won’t run away fast enough.
Nor was that the only demonstration of Brave Sir Dayton’s incoherence. After jumping on the uparmoring hype earlier this month, Dayton finally had the chance to actually ask real servicemen about their equipment — and then refused to believe them:

Dayton, who sharply criticized the Bush administration for not providing U.S. troops with enough armored vehicles, said troops he spoke with in Iraq said they are getting the equipment they need.
“But I think we got an incomplete picture of that,” he added.

What? Does he think that the soldiers and Marines lied to him? Maybe he has a grand conspiracy in mind that involves every serviceman in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, and Karl Rove, all working together to make Dayton look like a paranoid idiot. The only flaw in this theory is that Dayton does that so well all by himself.