Maybe things aren’t as dire as this post suggested. Thompson, a longtime right-of-center defense wonk, writes the following:

Had it not been for the Bush Administration’s ill-conceived war in Iraq, Barack Obama would not be President today. He bested his other Democratic rivals to win the nomination and then went on to defeat Republican nominee John McCain mainly by promising to end an unpopular war. But he did not draw the lesson from that victory that one might have expected — rather than beating a hasty retreat out of Southwest Asia, the new President listened to his military advisors and stuck with the plan for stabilizing Iraq. Furthermore, he focused greater funding and forces on Afghanistan, the place from which the 9-11 attacks had actually originated. Of course, that was exactly what he had said he would do during his election campaign, but many observers had wrongly assumed that his rhetoric about focusing on Afghanistan was just a smokescreen for exiting Iraq. It turns out he actually meant what he had said, and because the timetable for drawing down in Iraq overlapped with the timetable for surging in Afghanistan, he ended up requesting more money for the military in his first defense budget than the Bush Administration ever had.

Now, I recognize that I’m not the typical progressive, in the sense that I, like, approve of the Afghanistan strategy and don’t have a problem with the pace of withdrawal in Iraq. Nor will many progressives, myself definitely included here, favor the inexorable expansion of the base Pentagon budget.

But consider this not just from a progressive perspective but a conservative perspective. I wrote about that in this post, but to merge it with what Thompson’s saying, what’s beginning to happen, thanks to the failures of the Bush administration, is that the Democratic coalition looks as-or-more attractive to a generation of security-minded folk, including within the military, than the GOP. This carries with it the classic dilemmas that any expansion of a coalition carries. But because I count myself in both camps, I’m pretty happy about it. It’s an expansion opportunity. As I’ve found over the past, I guess, eight years, there are more points of similarity than differences if both sides are willing to listen to the other.