This seems to me to be one more reason to take Bill Richardson seriously.

PrairieStateBlue

Ok, so how do we move the Overton Window if Richardson is at zero. Go negative? Not only should there be no US forces there but some Iraqi forces should be based here?

for Democrats.

The rest are bush-lite.

I did inhale.

Bill Richardson is no more serious than anybody else who is wrong. Him being deadly serious and wrong doesn't give anybody comfort, but the enemy.

(via Missing Links blog)

Advice for the Iraqi Resistance on US politics
An Al-Quds al-Arabi op-ed writer and supporter of the Iraqi resistance, Awni Qalamji, has some advice for everyone, and particularly for the resistance, about the American political process. First, he notes, the confrontation between Democrats and Bush over Iraq policy will no doubt escalate between now and the 2008 presidential elections, so it shouldn't come as a surprise if this continues to dominate American and world attention. And the word the Democrats will be using is "withdrawal" because it was successful for them in 2006. But it is important not to lose sight of the fact that both parties are equally dominated by American capital, starting with the military firms, oil companies, and so on, and even more important that both are dominated by the "Zionist lobby", and here he cites the Walt-Merscheimer report. The result is that both parties share the same outlook on the world.

And so on this basis, when the Democrats focus on "withdrawal from Iraq", this by no means implies an acceptance of the defeat of the occupation project, which would be tantamount to a global American-Zionist defeat. Rather, the real aim in all of this [for the Democrats] is the defeat of Bush and his party in the 2008 presidential elections, seeing that the word "withdrawal" worked for them in the congressional elections [of 2006]....
...
And he says proof of the American intention to keep their forces in Iraq indefinitely is the fact that that the US is constructing 14 megabases in various parts of Iraq, along with 145 other installations to act as connectors.

Next he outlines what he thinks the political objectives are with respect to the Iraqi resistance. There are two major American aims here, he says:

The first aim is to change the war from a war between the resistance and the forces of the occupation, into a war between Iraqis themselves. Secondly: If the Americans can make the weak nationalist forces believe that they [the Americans] are actually responding to their demand for a withdrawal timetable, and that the time has therefore come to join in the political process--if they can make that happen, then it would be a blow to the Iraqi national resistance, or at least it would complicate the fight between the resistance and the occupation, and delay the liberation of Iraq.
...
http://arablinks.blogspot.com/2007/04/advice-for-iraqi-resistance-on-us.html

Whether Richardson is ahead of the curve on "no residual forces", or he's posturing to wangle anti-war support, it's too early to tell. But the article above clearly highlights the point that both major parties in the US have a similar position in "safeguarding access to awl", be it through outright imperialist warfare, or more "soft power" stuff, nobody seriously seeking the presidency would call for abandonment of US influence in the Gulf. George HW Bush once memorably stated that "[the] American lifestyle is non-negotiable", and that means all the awl that they can drink, full stop. And, find me a Democrat who doesn't have the Israeli point of view top of his/her foreign policy agenda, which implicitly requires a "muscular" (God, I hate that word!) approach to dealing with Israel's "enemies".
All the best, Bill, but eventually you'll get bitten by the reality bug.