Let me second Ed Kilgore's recommendation of With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defending Liberty edited by his colleague Will Marshall. I haven't read all of the essays it contains (by various authors) but I've mowed through about 60 percent of them and many are excellent. Ed summarizes the thrust as "to analyze the administration's and the Republican Party's failures of leadership--not just their incompetence, but their flawed ideology--and lay out an alternative agenda rooted in the progressive internationalist tradition." This is precisely what the world needs, and exactly what Democrats are going to need to do in 2006 and 2008. That said, I question the cogency of trying to do so while saying . . . nothing . . . about the invasion of Iraq.

Obviously, any candidate for office in those elections is going to be expected to say something about Iraq. Among other things, we have over 100,000 soldiers currently fighting a war there, which is a situation being are going to be asked to comment on. And, of course, while one's view of the wisdom of the initial decision to invade hardly determines one's view of what should be done from here, the questions have a certain obvious interrelationship.

But beyond that narrow question, it's extremely hard to analyze the GOP's "flawed ideology" without saying something cogent about George W. Bush's most high-profile national security initiative and his own characterization of the same. Democrats have gotten a lot of mileage out of -- and achieved a reasonable degree of unity by focusing on -- the question of Republican incompetence in managing the occupation of Iraq. But, as Ed says, it's vitally important for progressives to be able to transcend this critique and say something about the failure of conservative ideology and the availability of a superior progressive alternative.

That requires one to take a stand on whether or not the invasion of Iraq is consistent with the "internationalist tradition" in which most Democrats situate themselves. My view is that it is not, but obviously others take the reverse view. But this is something voters are going to want to hear about. It would be more convenient for progressive leaders not to hash this out; a lot of us would in many ways just as soon bury the hatchet and focus are energies on the "far enemy" in the GOP. But, again, the invasion and the intra-family dispute over it was hardly some obscure event in the past that Democrats are going to be able to sweep under the rug.