President Obama will talk jobs tonight. Good. That’s what we should have been talking about all year. Here’s all thirty-five words of our suggested script for the speech:

“Good evening. To get Americans working again, we must cut our massive war budget and find better ways to spend that money. Thank you, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.”

This would be by far the shortest presidential speech on jobs ever given, and one of the most effective plans given in years to get people back to work.

193,000 jobs. That’s what we could have created, at minimum, for the money that war contractors wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that “as $60 billion in U.S. funds has been lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade through lax oversight of contractors, poor planning and payoffs to warlords and insurgents, an independent panel investigating U.S. wartime spending estimates.”

If you thought we were going to have a rational, fact-based debate about cuts to the out-of-control military budget in this country, think again. The Pentagon and their war industry allies are mounting an aggressive, fear-based campaign of hyperbole and spin to scare Congress away from cuts that could affect contractor profits. The reason for this propaganda push is simple: if Congress rationally considers how much we should spend on our military, major cuts will follow. And that’s a good thing.

The deal worked out to allow a rise in the debt ceiling gives us our first real chance in more than a decade to make significant cuts to our country’s out-of-control war budget, but we are going to have to fight for them. The war industry is already deploying their favorite kind of stealth weapon on Capitol Hill to protect their profits: money and influence. Members of the newly-announced deficit committee have together taken around $1 million in campaign and PAC contributions from military contractors since 2007, and these companies plan to “cash in” on these donations to stop real cuts to big war contracts. That’s why Brave New Foundation is moving quickly to launch a new campaign, War Costs, to counter their profit-protection strategy, and we need you with us.

The debt limit crisis that’s consumed Washington, D.C. created an unexpected silver lining: the first opportunity in a decade to make real cuts to our runaway military budget. The deal reached to allow a rise in the debt limit “includes about $350 billion in guaranteed cuts for the Pentagon and other defense-related programs, plus up to $600 billion in additional reductions that will be triggered if Congress fails to reach a different agreement” to reduce the deficit. These cuts would have been completely unthinkable to D.C. conventional wisdom as recently as a year ago, but rising public opposition to two unpopular wars and concerns about the budget have finally put this bloated spending in danger. If we seize this opportunity, we can make big strides toward correcting a broken foreign policy that’s made our weapons, not our ideals, the most prominent face of America abroad.