Greg Sargent had a great post on TPM Cafe making the case that the ’06 midterms vindicated the views of those of us who’d argued for strong Democratic counterattacks on the national security issue rather than those of the “duck and cover” camp. Ed Kilgore, however, correctly ripostes that you can’t chalk duck-and-coverism up to the hawks of the DLC. As Ed says, their outfit has long (and I mean long, going all the way back to “The Politics of Evasion”) called for more robust Democratic engagement with these issues.

The trouble, at the end of the day, is that though they have perfectly correct views on this meta-level issue, people in the liberal hawk neighborhood tend, on an operational level, to actually agree with George W. Bush about the bulk of the most important national security issues. Not that they’re secretly Bush-lovers. Quite the reverse. They hate George W. Bush with a passion. With, indeed, a passion so strong that I think it tends to blind them to the extent to which they agree with him. Most generally, neoconservatives and liberal hawks essentially agree that the key to combatting jihadism is to combine killing terrorists with a large-scale effort to transform Muslim societies. Mainstream liberals and many conservative realists, by contrast, think that you need to combine killing terrorists with an effort to address widespread Muslim political grievances.

That, I think, is the big conceptual debate about national security in this country, and lots of the leading figures in the Democratic Party are on Bush’s side of the argument. Nor should that fact be especially surprising, since upper-level professional politicians and professional political operatives all chose their partisan affiiations long before anyone especially cared about Islamist terrorism.

On November 11, 1918 the German Empire and the Allies signed an armistice at Compiègne, France thus concluding one of the most egregious wastages of life in human history.

Sadly, even the thrill of electoral victory can’t change the fact that the war goes on in Iraq in its typical violent, maddening way with dozens injured (and several killed) by car bombs in Baghdad. Carl Levin’s working on some kind of resolution to indicate congressional opposition to an open-ended military presence, but based on the vote count for the last Levin Resolution on Iraq, I’m not sure he can secure a majority even in the new congress.

A big divide among Democrats in the coming years will, I think, have a bit less to do with the substance of Iraq policy than just their analysis of what’s going to happen. A lot of Democrats seem to think that this very thorny problem will, conveniently, just kind of go away without them needing to do anything about it. Either Jim Baker or John Warner or Bush 41 or someone is going to clean up the mess. Since Don Rumsfeld did wind up getting fired, I’m not going to promise people that these scenarios won’t come to pass, but it continues to strike me as unlikely. Bush is a very stubborn guy, the conservative movement is very committed to endless bloodshed, etc. Most likely, if we want to see our policies in Iraq seriously change it’ll have to be — surprise! — the opposition political party that forces the changes.

Mark Kleiman observes that “since its reform under Bill Clinton” the Veterans’ Administration health care system “now has the best medical-records system going and produces high-quality health care at a reasonable cost” and wonders if we couldn’t “move a baby step toward national health insurance by allowing non-veterans to buy into the VA system at a price equal to whatever the VA figures is its marginal cost?”

The initial, emotional reaction from veterans’ groups might be opposition, but surely having a bigger client base would strengthen the VA system politically, against the moment — coming soon — when we’re no longer at war and when, accordingly, treating veterans well starts to lose political saliency saliency.

I’m sure this isn’t a new idea. Is there a good article that canvasses the pros and cons?

Phillip Longman’s 2005 Washington Monthly article “The Best Care Anywhere” laid out how the VA came to be such a solid system and considers a related idea: “What if we expanded the veterans health-care system and allowed anyone who is either already a vet or who agrees to perform two years of community service a chance to buy in? Indeed, what if we said to young and middle-aged people, if you serve your community and your country, you can make your parents or other loved ones eligible for care in an expanded VHA system?”

Why make public service a requirement for receiving VHA care? Because it’s in the spirit of what the veterans health-care system is all about. It’s not an entitlement; it’s recognition for those who serve. America may not need as many soldiers as in the past, but it has more need than ever for people who will volunteer to better their communities.

Obviously, adding something like a community service requirement makes this somewhat less attractive as health care policy, but does have political benefits in terms of reducing the negative initial emotional response from veterans’ groups that Mark worries about. I, however, worry that this is the kind of small-scale change that shrinks rather than grows the constituency for a more systemic reform over the long term. To me, it’s always seemed that instituting universal health care for children, as Jonathan Zasloff proposes is a constituency-building small reform and thus, the sort of thing one should look at doing. Steve Teles, however, disagrees:

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