Democrats, National Security and Nukes

An excellent thread about national security, Democrats and nuclear threats over at Matt Yglesias's new place. He quotes Peter Scoblic of TNR:

[Democrats] must explain that nuclear weapons--not simply abstractions like tyranny or hate or evil--pose the greatest threat to the United States. And they must explain that, in contrast to Bush's fantasy, in which the earth is cleansed of evil, theirs is a story--all the more optimistic because of its realism--in which the concrete goal of securing and destroying fissile material can be accomplished through concrete steps.

Read the comments too. Money quote by commenter Gary Boatwright:

The first step is to reject the concept of "conservative hawk" and "liberal hawk." In the interest of ideological accuracy we should substitute "neo-conservative warmonger" for the term "conservative hawk" and "conservative warmonger" for the term "liberal hawk." The warmongers at TNR and the DLC are not liberal.

The second step is to recognize that the GWOT is simply a recycled version of the Global War On Communism. GWOT and GWOC are identical in every respect, including the lack of intellectual and ethical integrity. The Cold War had no identifiable military objective and neither does the GWOT.