Jon Powers, candidate for Congress in NY-26, has written a very powerful and articulate piece in The Huffington Post about the 5-year anniversary of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished.”  Here’s a sample:

There was no plan for securing. There was no plan for reconstructing.

Lieutenant Colonel Alan King recalls, in What Was Asked of Us, that as he rolled into the Baghdad Airport “they told me I had twenty-four hours to come up with a reconstruction plan for Baghdad.” You read that correctly. A Lieutenant Colonel on his way to Iraq, was given 24 hours to “come up” with a plan.

Unfortunately, the mission was far from accomplished. The mission was never defined. How can an army accomplish a mission when no one decides what the mission really is? This is failure of leadership on the largest scale imaginable.

Powers goes on to list solutions:

In short, the mission needs to finally be defined.

Our new mission is to bring our troops home safely, securely, and soon.

This election is about embracing our new mission. It’s about ending our military engagement, and about beginning a political engagement.

To achieve our new mission, America must return “leadership by example” to the world. And that means implementing strategies to address the following:

• The tragedy of hundreds of thousands of veterans coming home to a broken Veterans Administration
• Engage the millions of moderate middle-class Iraqi refugees who have lost their homes and are at risk to becoming recruited by radical elements
• Reform our approach to national security so that our military is not the only tool we use to solve political problems
• Bring accountability to the war profiteers and criminals who have fleeced our taxpayers and stolen from our troops
• Begin a diplomatic surge to engage the entire region of interested parties to help solve centuries old ethnic resentments and struggle

And that’s just the beginning.

I am running for Congress so that we can finally address and accomplish our new mission…

Read the entire piece and pop a comment in over at Huffington Post.