The Iraq War = The Corrupt War

Democratic Leadership,

You have a problem with details --- you're mired in them. When you go into details, you create the opportunity for everyone to have a problem with something.

Why do you go into details so readily? Because you're currently the party of tactics, not strategy and vision. You're like the plumbers of government, trying to explain to Americans about all the crap you see every day. Meanwhile, the Republicans look like white-collar executives, setting strategy, taking risks, and marketing their offerings like executives do to Wall Street in Corporate America.

While it would be foolish to think that the entire party can transform itself into an executive-style organization in under a year, it's not foolish to think that carefully crafted talking points can jump-start America's belief that you are, even if you are not quite there yet.

Let's start with some high-level attacks on the Iraq war. Have you noticed what happens when you say things like "withdrawal time lines" and "withdrawal immediately"? Your ideas get instantly scrambled and distorted by the Bush Administration into "cut and run" and "defeatist" messages. In other words, you lose this battle because Americans want to believe and follow the lead of the executives, not the plumbers. We're all conditioned to think this way through our working environments.

Since you cannot instantly transform into executives, start sounding like a management consultant instead of a plumber. Provide professional, high-level assessments that talk to the problems you see in our strategic and tactical approach, and provide alternative, break-through solutions that are designed to impress.

As management consultants, it is quite fair and effective to characterize the Iraq War as a Corrupt War that needs to be stopped immediately as it is designed today, and a new initiative immediately started to replace what we have today.

As consultants, you will raise the following reasons for this war effort being corrupt:

• The intelligence was faulty, and the government knew it before we went into war (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5024408, http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/5161)
• Our claims of Saddam being evil for torturing and killing his own people is undermined by America's torturing and killing Iraqis as a part of the war effort
• Abu Gharib
• Summarily ignoring Joe Wilson's findings in Niger re: aluminum tubes due to politics
• Scooter Libby, an Iraq War architect, indicted for lying under oath
• Rumsfeld did not provide the amount of troops required to maintain order
• American troops didn't have the armor they needed for their protection
• The war has created new recruiting tools for terrorist organizations, escalating the war on terror
• We are paying off the Iraqi free press to run American propaganda in their newspapers
• No-bid contracts given exclusively to American firms to rebuild Iraq
• Destroyed decades of good will America has earned around the world since World War II
• Hurt domestic morale so severely that we are no longer able to recruit enough people capable of maintaining adequate levels of military readiness.

When something is corrupt -- be it in your personal computer or an organization like Enron -- you fully remove the corruption immediately so it cannot further infect. We must take the same approach to this war:

• Immediately end the Corrupt War in Iraq as it is defined today to instantly destroy the corruption that the Bush Administration has allowed to occur.
• Immediately begin two new initiatives that replace the Corrupt War:

1. Launch "Operation New Iraq" - an initiative that is divorced from all of the corrupt reasons and rationales for going to war, divorced from confusing Iraq with 9/11, and divorced from the word "war" itself. Instead, this operation focuses solely on rebuilding the nation that needs to be reconfigured to survive without a dictatorship. America no longer occupies -- it assists Iraq as a support force. If this is done convincingly, we might just get our European allies to help out as well.
2. Re-launch "The War on Global Terrorist Groups" - an initiative that is tied to the "War on Terror" but looks at dangerous extremist organizations, no matter where they are in the world, including Iraq.

By instantly dissolving the current war, we dissolve the corruption that this administration has let infect the war effort. That does not at all mean that this administration is off the hook. In fact, by stating this approach, you are firmly placing the word "corrupt" on this administration as a de facto descriptor. It's an implicit attack, which is much more powerful than a direct attack.