The Democrats are going to lose unless they manage to co-opt the Bush doctrine of pre-emption. The need for pre-emption is something that everyone knows in their gut. Being opposed to pre-emption means always waiting until our citizens are dead before doing anything about it. Dean knows this. "Confederate Flag" voters know this. Unfortunately, CF voters don't know Dean knows this. They look at dean and dean's supporters and see people like whoever was quoted in some article I read recently saying "I believe pre-emptive war is fundamentally immoral" - and this rightfully scares them. This is what Dean needs to say to win the general election:
"Look, there are two ways to do pre-emption.
There's the Dean way, which means keeping our special agents and our translators and our military units on the trail of Al Qaeda to destroy them BEFORE they attack us. It means defusing the North Korea crisis BEFORE they go nuclear. It means standing up to the Saudis to stop funding schools of terrorism in order to stop people BEFORE they become terrorists. It means pre-empting the sale of russian nuclear material to terrorists on the black market by not being stingy on funds to increase security at those facilities and prevent terrorism BEFORE they acquire the weapons. The Dean way looks at all of our threats and works on those that are the most dangerous by pre-empting them BEFORE they hurt us.
Then there's the Bush way, which means taking all our translators and special agents and intelligence resources away from Al Qaeda in order to attack a country that everybody knew posed virtually no threat to us and cost a huge amount of blood, money, and international good will, and probably created far more terrorists in the process. The Bush way looks at all of our threats and attacks whichever one will most help his campaign contributers.
After 9/11, America needs to pre-empt threats, but we have to do it correctly, and that means having a president in the White House who is competent and engaged enough to assess the probability of different threats and it means having a president in the White House who is accountable to no interest but the American People. My campaign is. . ."
What Dean could also say in addition:
"Look, if everything George Bush said about Iraq was true, the bio-weapons trailers, the uranium from Africa, the ties to Al Qaeda, the uranium purification tubes, I would've supported the war. Because Iraq would have been a threat and we would have needed to take Saddam out. But this wasnt the case, and I knew it, and most experts knew it, and Bush should have known it, had he not dismantled our entire intelligence structure and trusted people we shouldn't have been trusting. That demonstrates a critical lack of judgement and we can't afford to make mistakes like that in order to protect America after 9-11. Mistakes like that cost us critical time and manpower in the fight against Al Qaeda, cost us critical money that could have been spent securing our borders, and cost American lives."
There are certain things that non-political Americans who lean republican because of national security know in their gut, and one of them is that we can no longer wait until after we've been hit to protect ourselves. Thats why the Republicans think they can win by running on the Bush doctrine of pre-emption. If we let Bush get away with running on a concept thats obvious beyond argument and let him get away with pidgeonholing us into supporting a ridiculous position (waiting for Iraq to nuke us before attack them), then we have already let him win the election.
