# Posted 2:39 PM by Patrick Belton  

A CALL OUT FOR HAWKS IN THE PARTY OF TRUMAN, ACHESON, AND JFK.... Several bloggers (including Daniel Drezner and Josh Marshall) are linking to Democrats for National Security, an organization of hawkish Democrats recently founded by Timothy Bergreen, a former State Department official who served during the Clinton administration. First for the good news: people of both partisan persuasions will hopefully recognize the United States is best served when neither political party enjoys a monopoly on supporting well-funded military and intelligence services, or espousing a strong U.S. political engagement with the rest of the world on issues such as the promotion of democracy or freer trade. When both parties are equally trusted by the public on matters of foreign policy, then it is more likely for the party out of government to act in the role of a responsible opposition - enjoying more political capital to, say, criticize U.S. security alignments with authoritarian governments, promote greater U.S. engagement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, or call for a international economic policy more honestly committed to the pursuit of freer trade. (This to say nothing of, for instance, criticizing the present administration's handling of Iraq from the position of a commitment to democracy promotion in the Gulf and Arab world, rather from a less noble position of hopes the U.S. involvement will fail, tarnishing the current administration in the forthcoming election.) All of these are useful additions to a policy conversation which could be made by a responsible opposition parties with trustworthy credentials on letting politics stop at the water's edge.

Now for the bad side: in spite of sharing a common acronym with the internet's Domain Name System, the Democrats for National Security's website suffers from exceptionally bad web design, most notably spacing problems which make it almost unreadable. Oh well. One guesses the Dems have got to start somewhere.

UPDATE: Tim Bergreen writes in helpfully to say that only iMacs seem to be having problems with his template - thanks! Mac users should read it anyway, while all the while savoring carefully all the feelings of moral superiority that come from using a better-designed machine.

UPDATE 2: Our readers are the greatest! MM just wrote in with detailed instructions on how to fix the DNS's website, which we passed on to Tim. Thanks! So that's our contribution - now we hope OxBlog will be invited to the Democrats for National Security's parties!
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