the democratic option:
The Democrats did not send Bush an antiwar bill. They sent him tepid dead-in-the-water petro-imperial legislation that that would have funded Cheney and Bush’s oil occupation at more than $100 billion and set non-binding timelines for the partial withdrawal and imperial re-deployment of U.S. forces in Iraq. As the Fourth International’s Bill Van Auken rightly observed last week (Van Auken 2007):

“While media reports on the Congressional legislation routinely refer to it as a plan for the withdrawal of US troops from occupied Iraq and ending the war, the language of the bill makes clear that what is involved is a tactical ‘redeployment’ that would leave tens of thousands of US soldiers and marines in Iraq for years to come. The bill incorporates ‘benchmarks’ to be achieved by the Iraqi government that were spelled out by Bush himself as part of the escalation of the war initiated early this year. Included among them is the passage of new oil legislation that would open up Iraq’s vast reserves to exploitation by US energy conglomerates. The legislation proposes that ‘redeployment’ begin by next October—while giving no indication of what number of troops it proposes be withdrawn at that time—and be completed by March of 2008. This timetable is not binding, but merely a goal suggested by the legislation. The bill...would essentially allow the occupation and war to continue indefinitely, with US troops deployed to protect a massive new embassy being constructed in Baghdad to house a virtual colonial government and to guard ‘American citizens’ sent by the oil companies to reap massive profits off of Iraq’s oil fields. At the same time, under the cover of a struggle against ‘al-Qaeda,’...US troops would remain embroiled in a dirty counterinsurgency campaign aimed at crushing the resistance of the Iraqi people...The differences separating the Democrats and Congress and the Bush White House are not between an anti-war faction and a pro-war one, but rather between two pro-war parties, vying over the best tactical means of pursuing the US campaign of neo-colonial aggression in Iraq.”

(...) The way out of this significantly self-made dilemma, Brecher and Smith observe, is to acknowledge, expose, and denounce the occupation as wrong and to drop the imperial assumption that Iraq was “ours” to “lose.” As long as the Democrats believe or claim to believe that the criminal oil invasion was initiated with “the best of intentions” (see Obama 2006, pp. 290-309, 317; Street 2007) and worth winning (even if its launching was a “strategic blunder”), they will be (somewhat deserving) targets for the “defeatism” charge.
(...) As Tuft's University political scientist Tony Smith noted recently in the Washington Post, there's no real foreign policy difference between the Republicans and the Democrats when it comes to "doctrinal questions." The leaders of both parties are equally committed to U.S. world supremacy. Both wings of the narrow-spectrum U.S. party system strongly embrace U.S. interventionism, militarism and (when "necessary") unilaterialism in the name of spreading "democracy" and "free markets."
(...) If anything, the "neoliberal" Democrats' main foreign policy claim is that they can do a better job of conducting this imperialist foreign policy than the "neoconservative" Republicans. "We are the better, more effective and competent Men and Women of Empire" is the basic claim. Such was the essence of the John F. Kerry "Reporting to Duty" campaign.
(...) Democratic administrations invaded and imposed neo-slavery on Haiti (Wilson), intervened against the Russian Revolution (Wilson), needlessly atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Truman), and lied about Soviet intentions and the nature of post-WWII conflicts to “scare the Hell of the American people” in order to garner their support for a permanent war economy and set off the Cold War (Truman). Democratic administrations killed hundreds of thousands in Korea (Truman again), initiated and escalated the vicious imperial U.S assault on Vietnam (JFK and LBJ),invaded the Dominican Republic (LBJ), imposed the lion’s share of the U.S.-led economic sanctions that killed at least a half million Iraqi children (Clinton), killed thousands in a missile attack of Sudan (Clinton), bombed Serbia in the false name of humanitarianism (Clinton) and signed legislation ending poor peoples’ entitlement to public family cash assistance in the U.S. (Clinton).