Third Way!

Sharon Burke says you should stop tarring her and her colleagues with the generic "centrist" brush:

The United States needs to get out of the war in Iraq. We should have never, never been in it in the first place. This war was a stupid idea, not just a badly executed idea.

That is my position. It is – and always has been – the position of Third Way. Well, actually Third Way did not exist when we got into this war. But I certainly know it was my position, and that of all four founders of this group. One of them, Matt Bennett, moved to Little Rock, Arkansas to work for Wes Clark’s campaign because he thought Clark was the best anti-war candidate. So let there be no doubt that Third Way’s team has opposed this war from the very beginning.

She also notes that "I hope that the people of the Middle East will have an opportunity to benefit from open economies and representative governments . . . [b]ut I do not believe that invading other nations to force them into democracies can possibly work, and I really don’t believe it can work in the Middle East." I think it's fair to say that I have major disagreements with a lot of the domestic policy stuff that's come out under the Third Way umbrella, but netroots folks would do well to keep in mind that unlike, say, the DLC, Third Way has a pretty good foreign policy track record. Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck, authors of this new Third Way report on national security, for example, were also Iraq War opponents from the beginning.