I welcome the news of the draw down of 30,000+ troops in the next year and a half, and if nothing else develops in that time, I will be pleased that we're making a good start to getting our troops home, and ending this war.
That, I think is a good paragraph to start with, a nice stake to put in the ground politically. Disappointment? Disappointment doesn't help make a policy popular. Disappointment just makes our President look like he can't please anybody, which means the Republicans, with their lockstepped constituency, can look better, since they've got decisivity. You know, it's something like truthiness and being misunderestimatedness. They're the deciders.
Rather than make our president look weak by whining, we should give him our full support, and then ask for more on top of what he's already given us.
So, the second paragraph might read something like this:
The President has given us a good start, but I think the country is ready and willing to move more troops out. Sun Tzu, in speaking about long campaigns, once said that nobody ever brilliantly protracted a war. Even in his time, in ancient China, an extended war beyond your borders was an expensive proposition. Centuries of advances of military technology have only changed the economics for the worse. History has not been kind to nations that get entangled in long-term wars. No enemy's defeat is worth the destruction of one's own nation.
And the third:
Let the nation we now turn to rebuilding be our own. We spend hundreds of billions to fund wars overseas while people here at home see their homes, their communities, their very nation sinking into a nightmare of economic stagnation. Republicans complain about deficits, but they made the choice to finance these wars with debt dollars rather than tax dollars, and that has caused American more fiscal damage that any emergency measure we had to bring in to rescue the economy, and has done so for longer. It's time to implement one of the strongest deficit reduction programs we could: ending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
That's my general drift. We need to draw the line at Obama's policy, make meeting that pace, or exceeding it our goal. Why? Because if we want to solidify support for the more leftward of policies, we need to drag that God-forsaken Overton window back from the right, and that means setting this new policy as a Ground state: we are getting out, we will leave, it's a question of when, not if, and the sooner the better.
It has to stop being simply a dualistic choice between Obama's proposal, and the Republicans, because the Republican side, at this point, don't deserve to be considered as an option. Their policies are not safe enough to allow to be carried out. Even if we take the time to argue about our policies internally, we need to devote the majority of our time to beating the shit out of the Republican Party on their policies, focusing public anger and discontent on them. Yes, Democrats need to be held accountable, but in doing so, we must take into account that Republicans are not being so wise, and their politicians are even more unaccountable, more difficult to moderate than our own.
We must pick the real best choice, not merely an ideal. We must make real progress on policy, not allow backsliding in policy by letting Republicans take power.
We must make the Republicans sorry they pushed those policies. We have to force them to abandon them, and only a stark series of serious political shellackings will chastise them enough to get them to capitulate.
We can start by backing our President's play, and then pressuring him, and everybody else to go further, and organize other people to do the same..