The Democratic position is very simple...it's time to CHANGE LEADERSHIP in the Iraq war, specifically, and the war on terror, generally.
These guys have had five years and they're not getting the job done. Our international stature is worse than ever; our military is stretched much too thin; we won't engage in direct talks with our biggest adversaries (Iran and No. Korea); we're feckless at home (just tour the Gulf Coast)and we're losing the war of ideas BIG TIME.
So...The rubber stamp Congress must be replaced by an effective check. Checks and balances...that's the American way!

Ah, excuse me--but when did the Democrats control what happens in IraqMire? It doesn't benefit them at all to say squat and subject themselves to Rovian dirty tricks. If the situation were reversed, the Repugs wouldn't say anything more than, "anything we have, has got to be better than the status quo". I would be pleased, if they said they'd end the "No Bid Contracts" to Halliburton. The way I'd frame it is, "A New Deal for Iraq, versus Bush's (and by implication, Halliburton's) Raw Deal". National Security includes a job and having the resources to put food in your family's belly. The Repugs have undermined that in Iraq and our troops are paying the price. The old saying goes "Idle hands are the Devil's Play Things". We would have endured a lot less casualties if the Administration had been interested in putting Iraq back to work, rather than looting the country for their corpoRATe Cronies.

Anything more than that,would give Karl Rove room to spin it, as ugly as he can make it.

Excellent question.

The Republicans position amounts to incompetence combined with corruption, killing thousands of American soldiers, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's and slowly destroying both the US army, the nation of Iraq, and American power in the region.

The Democrats should stand for something else.

Anything else.

To gary: I think this line of reasoning is BS and a cop-out. Let's see: bush's entire justification for attacking Iraq was a lie--every word, every reason. Against the recommenations of dozens of senior military officers, intelligence officials, and foreign policy experts, bush attacked the wrong country for the wrong reasons. Then, to make matters worse, he attacked without a plan. It has been well-documented that not only was tommy franks not interested in developing a Phase IV plan, Rumsfeld actually forbade it. To continue the unrelenting pattern of incompetence, bush sent our military to war without adequate equipment and placed dilletantes and campaign workers in charge of the administration of Iraq. The net result: a quagmire which has resulted in a civil war, AND has significantly strengthened the influence of Iran. And now, bush sits back and cynically allows our troops, our young men and women, to sit there in a situation THEY CANNOT WIN, to be sitting targets, because it would be too politically embarassing to admit any mistakes.

After all this, your only response is "What is the Democrat's plan?" How badly do bush and his neocon posse have to fuck up before you hold them accountable? Does bush have to personally rape and disembowel a baby on live national TV before it penetrates your thick skull that maybe we need a different direction? Are you so afraid, that you will allow your country and your Constitution to be systematically dismantled so that your big daddy bush can pretend to protect you? How can the public trust YOU to have a vote, when your critical thinking skills are that diminished?

Quite frankly, you could vote for a retarded gerbil using a Magic 8-Ball, and you would get a better performance as a president than what we have had for the past 5 years. But since you asked: you can trust Democrats to combine strength AND wisdom, instead of blind ideology. You can trust Democrats to allow the military experts to plan military strategy instead of ideological hacks like cheney and feith. You can trust Democrats to focus on TERRORISTS, not to use a "global war on terrorism" as an excuse to implement a neocon wet dream of a new American empire. You can trust Democrats to work with other nations who also have a stake in fighting terrorists, instead of alienating our allies and leading other nations to work against us, solely because they mistrust our intentions. There is an old saying, "If your only tool is a hammer, you see every problem as a nail." You can trust Democrats to use investigation and intelligence, as they did in Britain, to disrupt terrorist plots and capture suspects, rather than use only the blunt tool of traditional military force, a tactic has proven to be a failure throughout human history and that has proven to be effective only in creating more terrorists.

That's why you can trust Democrats.

Neither. Bush doesn't lie, remember? :\

Here is Billmon on the "Bush campaign speechifying":

There is some evidence that the Cheney Administration's all-fear, all-the-time format is bringing at least slightly improved ratings to the Terrorism Channel:

• A Wall Street Journal poll shows a slight bump in Shrub's approval ratings, which the paper attributes to the 9/11 media blitz.

• Rasmussen Reports shows a bigger bounce in its daily tracking poll, with Bush now up to 47%, his best number since mid-February. Bush tends to score high in Rasmussen's surveys, perhaps by intent, given the firm's conservative bent. Still, it's direction, not absolute level, that matters.

• Even the new Pew Center poll, which shows no bounce at all for Bush, has terrorism suddenly jumping higher on the list of issues voters are most concerned about.

Not surprisingly, most of the shift appears to be among conservative Republicans, who are responding in their traditional knee-jerk fashion to the administration's balls-out rhetoric about Islamofascists, the battle for civilization, World War III, etc.

Apparently, talking about waging total war against absolute evil is an adequate substitute for actually doing it.

The purpose of the Bush series of speeches was to shore up his base, make sure they come out to vote.  To date it seems to have done that.

What an extraordinary amount of bile posted in response to a genuine question about what the Democrats' position on Iraq is.

I was not defending the Republican position - I was simply asking what - if any - the Democrats official stance is, partly because I don't know (and still don't, after trudging through the abuse spewed out for having the temerity to ask); second because there are a vast range of Democrat positions on Iraq; and third because I'll bet all the money in my pocket against all the money in yours that the US public at large doesn't have the faintest idea what the Democrats' position is.

Hence, it remains my contention that a poll that shows huge support for a position the vast majority have no idea about is suspect. I suspect that the responses to that question had far more to do with "any position that isn't the Republicans is one I support", rather than a considered positive endorsement of an - at best opaque - position of the Democrats.

Now, can we have a sensible discussion or are the loony left contributors here incapable of doing anything other than living up to that well-earned title?

Gary -- there's something very odd about making a huge and deliberate mess, denying hotly that it's a mess, and then blaming others for not telling you how to clean it up. Especially when you have control of the means of to clean it up and they don't. If you haven't noticed the Dems have a position on Iraq, you might want to switch newspapers. Or just wait until November when they have the means to do something about it...

A better question might be: how can the public trust the Bush administration to not drag us into another even worse mess -- given their track record and given that they have two years left to screw up? Come to think of it, can you name a single entire year of the Bush administration which has been without one or another costly FUBAR?