Changing The Conversation on National Security

by digby

As we’ve “celebrated” the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion these last few days, with exciting speeches by the Commander in Chief and former war advocates pleading for everyone to forget what they said then and listen to them now, it’s probably predictable that the mainstream media failed to cover the Winter Soldier testimony last week or that they are pulling back their coverage from Iraq now that it’s not a sexy story. The fact that CNN has had Kira Phillips over there for a couple of weeks dressed in Prada fatigues and interviewing people in the Green Zone tells us everything we need to know.

And, predictably, the war is falling down the list of people’s concerns, what with the economy doing a belly flop and the necessity to obsessively report every tit-for-tat of the election campaign. There are only 24 hours a day seven days a week, after all.

But the war will not disappear just because the media finds it dull. It is our single most important national security challenge and it’s costing the taxpayers a mint and still killing and maiming thousands of people. If Democrats don’t make this election a referendum on this war, keep it on the front burner and offer solutions, Bush’s plan to dump this thing in the lap of the Democrats and then blame them for the failure will succeed and the politicians in the next congress and the white house will be under tremendous pressure to keep it going forever. That is, after all, how Cheney designed the war. (You’ll notice that oil companies and military contractors are showing record profits. Again.)

The good news is that Democratic challengers (26 and counting)are out on the stump at town meetings and fund raisers all over the country with their responsible plan to end the war in Iraq. It challenges the conventional wisdom and gives Democrats a way to explain in coherent fashion how the war can be brought to an end — and what a holistic liberal foreign policy might look like. The plan challenges the foreign policy paradigm with which we are all familiar — carrots and sticks, military vs diplomatic — and brings in some of the other important issues such as the media, the usurpation of the constitution and energy policy to address the fundamental problems we confronted during this lawless regime. Problems which resulted in the illegal and immoral quagmire of Iraq.

The plan is designed for candidates who need to show their constituents the way out and for all Democrats to begin to change the conversation on national security. It can be useful for the rest of us for the same purpose as we chatter about politics on our blogs, around the water cooler and over our holiday dinners.

You can access the plan at their web-site and endorse it yourself if you’d like.