Bush often poses the question, "Aren't we safer now that Saddam is out of power?" But this is not the real question, and we should not accept his framing of the issue. The real question is one of opportunity cost. Would we be safer now if we had done something else with the money, military power and time we have spent and will spend in Iraq? For example:
Would we be safer if instead we had put 50,000 troops in Afghanistan, kept the CIA/special forces there and spent $30-40 billion pacifying and reconstructing the country, building roads, schools and hospitals and shoring up democracy?
Would we be safer (and more prosperous) if instead we had spent $50 billion here at home building roads and schools and other public infrastructure and spent a few billion improving our police, fire and emergency health services?
Would we be safer and more able to respond to new challenges if instead we had kept our military intact, and let the UN inspectors find out what is now apparent to all, that Saddam had no WDM and was no real threat to us?
It seems to me that replacing the Bush false choice (invade Iraq or freeze the March 2003 status quo) with questions that make clear what other potential objectives and programs we have sacrificed to the neocon adventure in Iraq is a much better way to shift the national security debate. Looked at this way it is clear that Bush has squandered the political stability and good will we could have built in Afghanistan and in the Islamic world, and foregone the opportunity to by now have caught bin Laden and dealt Al Qaeda a severe blow. He has severely weakened the military and depeleted materiel to the extent that we could not respond to a serious threat or outbreak of severe instability elsewhere in the Middle East or the Korean Peninsula. He has shown the world that our vaunted intelligence capabilities are at least partially a mirage, and that while we can probably conquer most countries, we cannot successfully occupy and pacify even a weak country like Iraq. And we have spent the funds that could have been used to build infrastructure at home and provide for our own security, thus creating jobs here at a time when we desperately needed them.
In short, Bush put us at greater risk by invading Iraq; he did not make us safer. Our candidate should be able to make that case.