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Dean knows a bit about foreign policy. http://www.liberalslant.com/mh010404.htmDean, unlike past Dems, doesn’t back down or change course when advised by the pundits or weak-kneed advisors. He is confident in the accuracy of his positions and soundness of his morals. Al Gore could have dissected Bush like a biology class frog in the debates if handlers hadn’t tied him in a straight jacket of ‘be nice’ restrictions. “They all voted for the war. I didn’t. It seems my kind of foreign policy experience is the kind we need in the White House,” said Dean in a Town Meeting in Manchester, to loud applause.
Indeed, after Saddam’s capture, the other candidates waffled again, trying to ride the updraft of patriotism and Bush support created by it. Only Lieberman openly supports the war, though perhaps, like many neocons, more because he thinks it’s good for Israel’s security than America’s. (The only terrorism Saddam was committing outside Iraq was paying a $25,000 bounty to families of suicide bombers in Israel.) It’s not - the radicals drawn to Iraq will go to the West Bank when America leaves, and the resistance movement is a breeding ground for terrorists. Attacking the wrong enemy doesn’t boost our security (just as putting the wrong man in prison doesn’t), because the system itself is damaged and discredited, the guilty villains are still out there, and the waste of forces and resolve cripples our ability to react to them.
The Iraq War was a moral, strategic, and tactical idiocy; fought more for Bush’s psychological need to exceed his father than any rational rationale. The 73-27 pro war Oct 2002 vote in the Senate was the most stunning I’ve ever seen, especially when contrasted to the 53-47 squeaker in the totally justified Gulf War. The reasoning, we were told, was that the Dems thought that because they mistakenly voted against the first war and they were wrong, they had better vote for this one. WHAT? This President lost the election by 540,000 votes! Despite the drubbing the Dems took in the 2002 election, they didn’t get the message- that nobody votes for a coward. Courage transcends and crosses barriers of class, party, and race; and Party Democrats better understand that before they carve Dean down with a plethora of lies and half-truths- they might destroy the best thing that’s come along for the Democratic Party in a decade. Dean’s combative honesty is striking a deep chord in voters of all stripes, after being deluged by the blizzard of lies and Orwellian propaganda created by the Bush Admin.. For 3 years, the Dems have been getting steamrolled by Bush and the Repubs, often voluntarily- only Dean addresses this sorry state.
Dean’s foreign policy and Nat. security team includes 5 generals, admirals, and colonels, a Nat. Security Advisor, and CIA director. He is talking of urgent real security issues: tripling the budget to buying the loose fissionable material in the FSU (something I’ve been harping about for a decade-pan rt.); increasing security for the 19 million shipping containers that flood America every year- a desperately important subject (see Stephen Flynn); rebuilding the alliances damaged and circumvented by Bush’s arrogant war, increasing funding and integration of intelligence agencies rather than co-opting them with preordained findings; building a world-wide anti-terror alliance rather than insanely cranking up the long idled nuke-making machinery. Bush’s popularity may be 59%, but that’s a soft number built on the decaying detritus of his lies: 2/3 of them think Saddam and Osama are pals- a dangerous level of delusion. |
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