Saturday Editorial: Progressives, it's gut check time

Enough is enough.  It's time to stop letting Republicans distort our national security strategy -- especially when we know deep down that ours is stronger, tougher, long-term, and much more effective in combating terrorism.  Here are some suggestions.

It's gut check time folks.  We all knew that sometime before the November election the Bush Administration and their GOP allies were going to politicize our national security and say things about the Democratic Party's national security strategy that was flatly false.  They have to.  They have nothing else to run on.

Their Social Security privatization plan was exposed for what it really was.  The number of uninsured in this country is steadily on the rise.  The war with Iraq has been a failure.  The Administration has had five years to solve the nuclear standoff on the Korean Peninsula, but instead has outsourced that responsibility to China.  Corruption on K-Street is widespread.  This summer, Rick Santorum and a group of radical GOP Senators attempted to write discrimination into our constitution.  The fact is that the GOP are extremely desperate to divert attention away from reality.  So in politics, when issues completely favor one side, all the other side can do is resort to mischaracterizations and smears.

Even though this is expected, and even though I always try to make the political science student in me triumph over emotion, lately I have grown sick and tired of the fact that hardly any Democrat has responded to the GOP's charge that progressives are weak on terrorism.  We can't just sit around here and take it.  The question is what approach should we take in debunking their narrow-minded rhetorical notions?  There are many things we can say about Bush's failed foreign policy -- and we could go on about them for days.  But how to we narrow it down into one big idea? 

I have thought about it a lot.  We need to explain that Republicans, not Democrats, are endangering our national security because they have a one-dimensional approach when it comes to understanding the pragmatism that drives international system.  Andrew Bard Schmookler explained it wonderfully in a column published on the Smirking Chimp blog:

Now we can see what it is that the war on terror requires. It requiresgood intelligence and good police work and international cooperation.

It does not and did not require that the United States military invade another country.

We are up against an enemy that does not have borders, and does nothave armies. It is an enemy of hidden networks, many of which arelocated in the liberal democracies that are their targets.

By invading Iraq, the Bush administration distracted from the realwork in the war against terrorism. They've tied down our military in acountry that --as the 9/11 Commission reported-- was not involved in9/11, and was not at the heart of the real war on terrorism.

We now know that the president and his people were told by variousagencies that Iraq was not involved in 9/11. But they chose todisregard this information, and their words misled the American people.

WeDemocrats who criticize this disastrous war in Iraq are not soft onterror. We are all for fighting this shadowy enemy-- but we believe indoing it the smart way, the way that takes into account the kind ofenemy we face.

The Bush administration has blundered in their invasion in Iraq, aninvasion that has played into the hands of Osama Bin Ladin. The Bushadministration has weakened us for the real fight against terrorists,and has strengthened the people who want the West and Islam to sinkdeeper into war.

We know that there is a threat to America and to other Westerndemocracies. And we are hawks on prosecuting that struggle --throughthe kind of good work that the British investigators used to thwartthis recent terrorist plot.

The war in Iraq, however, has not made us safer. Quite the contrary.

And that's why opposing this war in Iraq is just the opposite of beingsoft on the war on terror. Karl Rove is trying to sell that lie, as away of covering up their disastrous decisions and their failure.

But these recent events remind us of the real nature of that war, and of what is required of us to wage it successfully.

We have to stand up and correct the embedded GOP notion that over-extended military force and a one-branch government at home are the only ways possible to fight terrorism.  That ideology is dangerous to our national security.  We need to stand up for law and democracy here at home, and for 21st century-style diplomacy-based counterterrorism abroad.

We can no longer afford to have loose cannons like John Bolton representing our principles in front of the international community.  Republicans are putting our security at risk, and are politicizing it to win elections.  They believe that political spin is more important than good ideas.

Progressives stand for smart counterterrorism.  We believe that the more we can develop strong relationships with other countries, the more those countries will work with us to use technology and the power of ideas to help make our world safer for democratic institutions.  We believe that fighting poverty and promoting education everywhere in the world will give young people more hope and a sense of responsibility, making them less likely to turn to radical religious clerics who want nothing more than to brainwash them and turn them into suicide bombers.

We have a much better national security strategy to offer, and it's about time we stop letting the Republicans get away with distorting the truth.

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Other sites blogging about this issue: TruthDig, The Existentialist Cowboy, Brilliant at Breakfast, A Rational Being, Newsvine, The Next Hurrah, Craig Murray, The Osterley Times, Faithful Progressive, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Media Matters for America, Crimes and Corruptions of the New World, The Moderate Observer, No Touch Monkey, Tennessee Guerrilla Women, The Carpetbagger Report, My Findory News, Bad Politics, Firedoglake, Daily Kos, Suburban Guerrilla, Majikthise, Left Center Left, The Indisputable Truth, Brownian Emotion, Liberal Woman, Cut to the Chase.