[Program Note: While I'm on vacation, I thought it would be fun to jump back about four years here. Because the 2012 presidential campaign is not going to be very interesting on the Democratic side, we're going to take a look back at when it was a real race, last time around. For the next eight days, we will be repeating our "Campaign Speech Series" from 2007, when we printed the full text of a speech given by every Democratic candidate. You can read the original introduction to this series to see the details of how it was put together, if you're interested. While we realize that these speeches are not exactly relevant to where we stand today, we still thought it'd be worthwhile to run them while we're on hiatus here. Regular columns are currently scheduled to return June 9th.]

Dennis Kucinich

http://www.dennis4president.com/home/

[Note: The Kucinich campaign was unable to provide a speech transcript from Congressman Kucinich for this series. A campaign official told me that Kucinich always speaks "extemporaneously" without notes, therefore they had no speeches available. I decided to relax the rules to allow their campaign to present me with something from Kucinich, so I am reprinting a position paper from the Kucinich website here instead of a speech. If you follow the link above and click on "Audio/Video" there are Kucinich speeches available for viewing or listening to on their campaign website.]

Strength Through Peace

Dennis Kucinich is the only Democrat running for President who has voted against authorizing the war in Iraq and against funding its continuation. He has proposed a bold, new policy to re-establish America's place in the world. Diplomacy and a return to statesmanship as the path to strong international leadership. A new policy of investing in our communities and our infrastructure. A new policy of Strength through Peace.

How to Emerge From the Neo-Con and Neo-Liberal Nightmare of the Arrogant Use of Power

"We need to understand the connection between peace and the environment. We know that life on our planet is threatened by the twin threats of global warring and global warming. They are linked, and we have to understand that as we cognize the world as being interconnected and interdependent, we know that resource wars are passe and that the focus on sustainability will create peace."

--Dennis Kucinich

The Cold War belief that peace comes through strength is as obsolete as the Edsel. In an interconnected world of trading partners afloat with nuclear weapons, war is unthinkable. The Europeans have turned away from the catastrophic wars of the last century which took over 100 million lives to embrace a new understanding of diplomacy and dialogue as well as a new understanding of patriotism. So must the United States. The world depends on it.

Does anyone in the world deny that the United States military is the strongest the planet has ever seen? Does anyone seriously believe that any country on earth can remain on the battlefield against the United States more than a half hour?

The United States must now embrace strength through peace. Because we spend more than the rest of the world combined we will clearly remain the world's most powerful nation. But with that power comes a great responsibility. We must use our unrivaled power to lead, not to bully, the rest of the world. War must truly become the last desperate measure of self defense, not the handy policy tool it is now used for.

We are the planet's first superpower able to destroy any society within an hour either conventionally or atomically. The fact that we can slice through any army on earth in hours has not prevented:

1) Growing antipathy and distrust towards the U.S. across the globe

2) Escalating bloodshed in Iraq

3) Looming wars in Iran and Syria.

4) Increasing terrorist acts against U.S. interests

5) Spiraling U.S. military spending

6) Spreading weapons of mass destruction

7) Growing conflicts and tension across the world

8) Ongoing arms race

By abandoning the arrogant "my way or the highway" attitude we can reengage the world in productive discussion on our common goals of universal peace and prosperity. Maintaining our current course of action will only end with a world in flames and economic ruin.

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