Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle ran
this article entitled,
Support grows for beefing up U.S. forces. Some see situations where volunteers may not be enough Excerpt:
Many in Congress and in wider policy-discussion circles aren't waiting to see the results of the Pentagon's stepped-up [recruiting] efforts. Sens. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. and Jack Reed, D-R.I., have proposed adding 30,000 soldiers to the Army. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., has proposed a 30,000-person increase in the Army and 10, 000 to the Marines, and Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, wants to add some 20,000 to the Army, 12,000 to the Marine Corps and 29,000 to the Air Force.
Has it occurred to any of these prominent Democrats, especially "last man to die for a lie" Kerry, that a better solution might be to rein in Bush's imperialist aggressions and reverse our evolution into the new Sparta?
More after the jump
The article goes on to say:
A bipartisan group put together by the Project for the New American Century, a group that reflects the thinking of the neoconservatives who have been so influential in determining President Bush's military and foreign policies, sent a letter to congressional leaders in late January. In it, the signatories wrote, "it is our judgment that we should aim for an increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, together, of at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years.''
Signers included not just such neoconservative stalwarts as magazine editor and Fox News contributor Bill Kristol, but also Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute and James Steinberg of the Brookings Institution, a Clinton administration National Security Council official.
Now the article does not say (as I thought on first reading) that Kerry signed the PNAC letter. But what on earth is anyone to the left of Paul Wolfowitz doing co-signing anything written by the premier neo-con/neo-imp think tank? Why on earth would the Progressive Policy Institute (the DLC think tank) or the Brookings Institution do anything to legitimize the intellectual authors of the Iraq aggression, the 21st century's premier war crime?
I'm not sure whether to be more exaxperated at the reporter, Edward Epstein, for not getting a quote by someone suggesting an anti-militarist alternative (the SF Bay area's own Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee come to mind, not to mention Dennis Kucinich), or at the slavish Dems who can think of no alternative but to try to outdo Bush at international bellicosity.
Nah, I take it back. That's not a hard call at all.
The grassroots activists that form the heart and soul of the Democratic Party were, and still are, viscerally opposed to aggressive war. The majority of the country is finally coming to agree with us, saying the Iraq war was a mistake.
Why are so many Democratic Party "leaders" choosing this time to strap on their swords and charge in the opposite direction?