Saturday, June 17, 2006
Defining the game
Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect writes a good piece on how the Democrats need to play the National Security game for the upcoming election. And it is not by playing a Republican on TV.
After a US missile attack killed the Al Qaeda chief in Iraq, White House political adviser Karl Rove lost no time in declaring to a Republican meeting in Manchester, N.H., that if Democrats had had their way, Zarqawi would never have been killed.This is the message we have to share, even with the Kool-Aid drinkers, because the lies and smears will be coming soon enough.
In fact, if Democrats had been in charge, we never would have invaded Iraq, and Zarqawi and his fellow international terrorists would never have gone there. As Senator Russ Feingold reminded the Take Back America meeting, two months after 9/11, the Bush State Department's own website displayed a list of 45 countries where Al Qaeda was active. Iraq was not among them....
.....Speaking at the same convention, former senator Gary Hart, who cochaired a national commission in the late 1990s on homeland defense and counterterrorism, spoke of the many threats to American national security that far outrank Iraq. These include nuclear proliferation, a genuine menace wrongly displaced by the White House obsession with Iraq; negotiated solutions to nuclear saber-rattling by North Korea and Iran; domestic security bungled by an administration that staffs key offices with cronies and strips National Guard units of first responders to provide troops for Iraq; and other regional threats from Islamist militants, as in Somalia where the administration clumsily backed local tribal warlords -- who were just routed by pro-Al Qaeda militants.
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