Lieberman: Smarter Than the Average Democrat
November 24, 2005, 10:18 pm |
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Senator Joe Lieberman is one Democrat not advocating a quick U.S. exit from Iraq. Of course, this will not sit well with cranks like Sen. Kennedy, nor with the other rabidly extreme leftists who probably consider Lieberman a “Zionist” sellout. From CNN.com:
Speaking from Baghdad on his fourth trip to Iraq since July, Sen. Joseph Lieberman on Wednesday said failure in Iraq would be “catastrophic” for the United States and the entire Middle East, and that U.S. forces should not pull out before Iraqi forces are fully trained.
“The two extremes that are often described by different people here … is that everything is going fantastic here in Iraq or that the country is about to collapse. In my opinion, neither one is true,” he told CNN. “We are somewhere in between.”
Lieberman, a senior Democrat from Connecticut, said Iraqis are striving to “put the nightmare of Saddam Hussein behind them,” but still need U.S. help.
“They are making progress, but they are not where they need to be yet and that’s what we have to help them to do before we can leave,” he said.
“The cost of successfully completing our mission here will be large in terms of American lives lost and money spent, but the cost of failure here would be catastrophic for us in the U.S. and for the Iraqis, of course — and I believe for the entire Middle East.
“And that’s why we are going to continue to be here until we get to the point where the Iraqis can take it forward on their own, and I think we are making progress in that direction.”
What rare clarity in the recent acrimonious “debate” currently taking place between Democrats and Republicans regarding the Iraq war — even including a scuffle on the floor of the House. Human nature: it is either all good or all bad.
Lieberman is dead-on when he says that there are “two extremes” in the debate. But there may just be a silver lining to all the acrimony: Some Democrats have softened their stance on calling for an immediate pull-out — the more sane ones realizing the absolutely disastrous consequences of leaving Iraq in the hands of al-Qaeda. And the Bush Administration has been forced by public opinion, Democrats, and some Republicans to examine their Iraq strategy more closely. Sometimes emotional blow-ups have positive consequences when tempers cool.
There is one point I will concede to the Left: The longer U.S. troops remain, the longer some Iraqis will be willing to leave the toughest jobs to American soldiers. This is just human nature. It is also human nature to face reality head-on only when you know there will be a time when you are on your own, with nobody to leave the tough lifting to. But the Left, backed by the 5th Estate, has certainly ignored the good news from Iraq. Abandoning Iraq simply for political gain is just sickening. Hatred for Bush seems to have superseded all sense and sensibility.
For example, a CNN reporter was interviewing a U.S. grunt in Iraq today. He asked her to comment on her 10-month stint in Iraq. She simply stated that she was helping Iraqis build their infrastructure. He said, “Someone must have gotten to you,” implying that the fact that she didn’t criticize the Iraq war was a sign of military censorship. She had nothing critical to add. Maybe she was satisfied with the good work she was doing. This expectation of negative feelings belies the media’s assumptions about the American presence.
By no means am I starting to adopt the cut-and-run strategy. But I am willing to listen to the opposition, and to consider human nature, both good, bad, or in-between. And I’m happy to know there is at least one Democrat who can be counted among the sane.
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November 30th, 2005 at 8:04 pm
[…] Now, one of the few remaining sane Democrats, Lieberman: Here is an ironic finding I brought back from Iraq. While U.S. public opinion polls show serious declines in support for the war and increasing pessimism about how it will end, polls conducted by Iraqis for Iraqi universities show increasing optimism. Two-thirds say they are better off than they were under Saddam, and a resounding 82% are confident their lives in Iraq will be better a year from now than they are today. What a colossal mistake it would be for America’s bipartisan political leadership to choose this moment in history to lose its will and, in the famous phrase, to seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory. … […]