Where are the powerful Democratic voices?

In the Sunday Talk shows, House Minority Leader John Boehner made the rounds claiming that the Iraq War “is all about A Qaeda”:

....Iraq is not about a civil war. Iraq is about Al Qaeda and 76 other terrorist groups operating there, and all of their effort is aimed at defeating the United States ... Where do we take on radical Islam who is hellbent on killing Americans and our allies?

The website Liberal Oasis, run by writer Bill Scher, does the Sunday talk Show breakdown every Monday. He watches so we don’t have to. I like what he said about Boehner and Newt Gingrich, and the failure to engage these people who they will say anything, no matter how ludicrous to anyone knowledgeable about the situation, to frame the debate to their advantage:

Bush is at 28%. 64% of Americans want a timetable for a 2008 withdrawal from Iraq. Twice as many as Americans believe, if we stay in Iraq, that terrorist attacks on the U.S. are more likely than less likely. Yet we should be not sanguine about the state of our foreign policy debate. Because we're barely having one.

The intentionally oversimplified conservative worldview is still being consistently articulated, without being challenged directly. As it was on Sunday with Gingrich and Boehner. That's a dangerous situation. Conservatives may be down. But by allowing them to inaccurately frame the overall debate, they can get back up.
Democratic opposition to the Iraq war has become clearer and stronger.

Presidential candidates are beginning to give speeches offering foreign policy vision. But we do not see those speeches become centerpieces of debate. We do not see Democratic leaders regularly debunking the false premises of the conservative worldview, to best crystallize the choice the people have for our foreign policy direction.

Here are some ideas for some quick hits, some quicker than others. In no particular order. Mix and match:

• They are going to call any attempt to correct their colossal mistake “surrender.” They don’t care if their stupidity weakens the country, or weakens our ability to fight the “War on Terror.” They just want to dump the problem they created in the lap of the next President.
• Repairing our damaged foreign policy is not surrender.
• We desperately need foreign policy reform [to modernize (to overhaul) (to rebuild) our foreign policy that has been so badly damaged by George Bush and Dick Cheney]
• You know, they love to call it “resolve,” “steadfastness,” “firmness” or “determination” and other great-sounding adjectives to justify refusing to look at the real facts. Before you confuse dangerous denial with admirable bull-headedness, remember what happens to the bull at the end. The bull keeps charging the red cape, and never has a clue what’s really going on.
• It’s all about them. They’re like the captain of the Titanic: “I’m not surrendering to some damned icebergs. I’ll show ‘em the stuff I’m made of.” We have a Titanic foreign policy. We need to start changing course fast.
• They always talk about the “enemy” in Iraq, and don’t have the slightest clue what they are talking about. The insurgency is not controlled by al-Qaeda. It’s Iraqis, mostly Sunni Iraqis, who dislike us and the government we created. There are tens of thousands of home-grown Iraqi insurgents, with millions of collaborators. They want us out. There are probably a few hundred Islamic extremists volunteering from other countries to fight a jihad against Americans. Somebody decided to call them “al-Qaeda.” We’re not sure who: it could have been the Administration, so they could go on Sunday talk shows and say they are “fighting the terrorists.” [They know none of the hosts will challenge them]
• It’s an unpleasant thing to say, but it’s something we have to face up to. Under George Bush and Dick Cheney, most of the rest of the world has come to think of us as a dangerous, warlike bully that cares only for ourselves. But they forget what many ordinary Americans know in their gut: “What goes around comes around.” Or maybe they just figure if they can hang on for another year-and-a-half, they’ll be able leave the “comes around” part to somebody else.
• We won the war four years ago. It is George Bush’s fantasy that cannot be won. What is the fantasy? That we could create a government ourselves that would happily allow American soldiers to stay in Iraq and would still be supported by the people. Do you think it’s fair and responsible to ask our armed forces to “win” something like that? How would you like it if some enemy invaded the United States, set up a government which then said, “Don’t worry, the foreign troops will stop patrolling the streets. They will just be on these bases spread around the country”?
• Our amazing firepower – our tanks, our Blackhawk copters, F-16s, cruise missiles and nuclear submarines – is not designed to fight people who think they are defending their country from a foreign occupation. We won the war four years ago. An occupation to create a friendly government is something completely different.
• George Bush is [like a punch-drunk palooka] throwing punches [swinging wildly] at yellow jackets. As he extends the service of Iraq veterans beyond limits established by the military, even those punches are becoming more arm-dead every day. And Bush is trying to turn the most highly-trained military warriors in history into police officers [into bouncers trying to keep patrons in an unruly bar from destroying each other]. That’s not what they trained to be.
• It’s a brain-dead foreign policy for dealing with terrorism. When Bush and his defenders try to pretend the Iraq War is a war against al-Qaeda, remember this: it’s false. The insurgency in Iraq is overwhelmingly Iraqis fighting against us because they want us to stop our military occupation of their country. Period. The Iraq War has nothing whatsoever to do with the real fight against terrorism. It was essentially a shell game to fool you when Bush blew the opportunity to get bin Laden.
• It’s going to take hard work and brains to restore our leadership.
• Most Iraqis want us out. Americans want us out. The longer we dither, the more strength the real terrorists gain and the more we are weakened. We have to start getting back on the right track now.
• Bush’s defenders like to cite other occupations to show we can succeed in Iraq. Our occupations of Germany and Japan were successful because we completely destroyed those countries in a World War. In the Philippines, it took 15 years of a nasty counter-insurgency and another 35 years of occupation as a U.S. territory before we left the Philippines as an independent country. Is that what George Bush has in mind? Did he tell us that in the beginning? And that's a Catholic country where Spanish was the main language and Europeans had been ruling it for several hundred years. We knew a lot more about what we were doing there. Under George Bush’s fantasy, when would this end --- if ever?