LA Times op-ed: Democrats: Get loud, get angry!

[DeepModem Mom]

Democrats: Get loud, get angry!
The only way to end this administration's string of blunders in Iraq is to go on the offensive.
By Morton Abramowitz and Samantha Power
April 10, 2006

....REMAINING IN OFFICE are individuals who have caused gargantuan harm to America's financial standing, to its citizens' welfare and to its overall security (measured even by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's standard: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"). Why are we confident that their ideology and their misjudgments will not lead them to do further damage? Why should we trust them to manage Iran any more successfully than they have Iraq?

And, with the Bush national security team still intact, why would other countries, on whom the U.S. relies to fight terrorism and proliferation, heed future U.S. threat assessments?

There is no panacea for Iraq. But even in the absence of a panacea, Democrats must alter the perception among Americans that the party is incapable of leading the country in wartime. Democrats must speak in unison and demand an essential and long-overdue personnel change. The secretary of Defense — the implementer of the greatest strategic blunder of the last half a century — must go.

The Democrats must resolutely call for Rumsfeld's resignation, and in the interests of enlisting Republican support for his ouster, they should introduce a censure resolution against him. (There is precedent for this; the House of Representatives censured President Lincoln's secretary of war, Simon Cameron, in 1862 on corruption grounds.)

Bush and his administration have managed to combine profound incompetence with profound certainty. The 2008 election is a long way off. If the Democrats stand any chance of improving U.S. foreign policy in the near term, while also positioning themselves to conduct it in the medium term, it will not be by making nice. It will be by adding another truth to the administration's absolutist gospels: If you screw up monumentally, you — like those harmed in your wake — will pay a price.

(MORTON ABRAMOWITZ, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, is a former assistant secretary of State. Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.")

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-power10apr10,0,1052389.story?coll=la-home-commentary