I remember last year's campaign season and how I said back then that the Democrat Party was not offering any solutions, merely opposition to President Bush and the Republican Party. I said that opposition alone does not a political party make. Without having an alternative plan, it's just loud squawking.

Well, recently DNC chairman Howard Dean has been squawking rather loudly about Iraq. In an interview given on San Antonio, TX radio station WOAI, Dean stated that the "idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong." In fact, Dean is a prominent member of the cut and run crowd. He wants to see all Reservists and National Guardsmen pulled out of Iraq immediately and the rest of U.S. troops out within 2 years. Retreat is not an alternative plan -- it's a failure to deal with the issue at hand. Dean's idea is not to deal with the problem of terrorism but to run away and say, "Don't hurt us." Dean goes on to pull another Democrat ploy -- compare it to Vietnam:

I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening.

Dean fails to recognize that his comparison is innappropriate and gravely flawed. Dean fails to offer any alternative to the Bush Administration's strategy for the War on Radical Islamic terror. It's the same thing we saw last fall during the campaign -- John Kerry wasn't so much a Democrat candidate for President as much as he was an anti-candidate against President Bush.

If the Democrat Party continues to push itself farther and farther to the Left, if they continue to offer opposition instead of alternatives, if they stay on their current path, we will have an even greater Republican majority at this time next year.

Keep it up, Howie!

Additional Thoughts
I just wanted to add something. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had some great comments in a speech he gave on Monday at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies which was reprinted in the WSJ's Opinion Journal. While I would recommend reading the entire speech, here is one quote that is salient regarding pulling out of Iraq:

Quitting is not a strategy. Quitting is an invitation to more attacks and more terrorist violence here at home. This is not just an hypothesis. The U.S. withdrawal from Somalia emboldened Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. We know this. He has said so.

The message retreat in Iraq would send to the free people of Iraq and to moderate Muslim reformers throughout the region would be that they can't count on America. The message it would send to our enemies would be: that if America will not defend itself against terrorists in Iraq, it will not defend itself against terrorists anywhere.

What is needed is resolve, not retreat; courage, not concession. Rather than thinking in terms of an exit strategy, we should be focused on a strategy for success. The president's strategy focuses on progress on the political, economic, and security tracks. You can read that strategy paper on the White House's Web site.