Joe Lieberman: Everything Old Is New Again

Technorati Tags: Joe Lieberman, troop surge, Gen. David Petraeus, op-ed in Wall Street Journal

Joe Lieberman instructs Congress to "declare a truce in the Washington political war over Iraq" until the end of the summer, when Gen. David Petraeus declares he will know whether "progress is occurring" in Iraq: "However tired, however frustrated, however angry we may feel, we must remember that our forces in Iraq carry America's cause--the cause of freedom--which we abandon at our peril."

Set aside, for the moment, the obvious: that any cause which requires Americans to surrender or set aside their freedom is more accurately called the cause of totalitarianism than the cause of freedom. Joe Lieberman's dishonesty goes way beyond mischaracterizing "the cause." He is lying about the very premise -- that Bush's "troop surge" is a new strategy and we should give it a chance -- he uses to urge Americans to shut up. Glenn Greenwald explains:

Lieberman has stood up today to assure us that we now have a great, brand new strategy in Iraq, that the fundamental problems with our prior tactics have been fixed, and that it is therefore our duty as Americans (still) to keep our mouths shut and be led to Victory:

And a new strategy is being put into action, with thousands of additional American soldiers streaming into the Iraqi capital. . . .

If we stopped the legislative maneuvering and looked to Baghdad, we would see what the new security strategy actually entails and how dramatically it differs from previous efforts. For the first time in the Iraqi capital, the focus of the U.S. military is not just training indigenous forces or chasing down insurgents, but ensuring basic security--meaning an end, at last, to the large-scale sectarian slaughter and ethnic cleansing that has paralyzed Iraq for the past year.

The new strategy at last begins to tackle these problems. Where previously there weren't enough soldiers to hold key neighborhoods after they had been cleared of extremists and militias, now more U.S. and Iraqi forces are either in place or on the way. Where previously American forces were based on the outskirts of Baghdad, unable to help secure the city, now they are living and working side-by-side with their Iraqi counterparts on small bases being set up throughout the capital. . . .

But the fact is that we are in a different place in Iraq today from even just a month ago--with a new strategy, a new commander, and more troops on the ground. . . .

I appeal to my colleagues in Congress to step back and think carefully about what to do next. Instead of undermining Gen. Petraeus before he has been in Iraq for even a month, let us give him and his troops the time and support they need to succeed.

This is rank deceit of the lowest order. Lieberman wrote almost exactly the same Op-Ed, on the same Wall St. Journal page, more than a year ago. Whereas today he is pretending that the problem has been one of insufficient troop strength and a lack of a coherent military strategy, he said exactly the opposite in his November, 2005 Op-Ed. Back then, he assured Americans that we did have an effective strategy for preserving order and also had a sufficient military force, and not only that, he insisted that we were succeeding in our mission to bring security to Baghdad and that conditions in Iraq were rapidly improving:

I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in the last 17 months and can report real progress there. More work needs to be done, of course, but the Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood unless the great American military that has given them and us this unexpected opportunity is prematurely withdrawn. . . .

The leaders of America's military and diplomatic forces in Iraq, Gen. George Casey and Ambassador Zal Khalilzad, have a clear vision of our mission there. It is to create the environment in which Iraqi democracy, security, and prosperity can take hold and the Iraqis themselves can defend their political progress against those ten thousand terrorists who would take it from them.

Does America have a good plan for doing this, a strategy for victory in Iraq? Yes we do. . . Mistakes, some of them big, were made after Saddam was removed, and no one who supports the war should hesitate to admit that; but we have learned from those mistakes and, in characteristic American fashion, from what has worked and not worked on the ground in Iraq. The administration's recent use of the banner "clear, hold, and build" accurately describes the strategy as I saw it being implemented last week.

Today, Lieberman said that the U.S. is focused on preserving security "[f]or the first time in the Iraqi capital" and that "previously there weren't enough soldiers to hold key neighborhoods after they had been cleared of extremists and militias." But in 2005, Lieberman assured Americans that he had just returned from Iraq and that "the administration's recent use of the banner 'clear, hold, and build' accurately describes the strategy as I saw it being implemented last week."

So whereas Lieberman is claiming now that everything is different today because we had no real strategy before for ensuring security, it was Lieberman himself who promised Americans in 2005 that we did have exactly such a strategy and that it was working so well that "we can have a much smaller American military presence there by the end of 2006 or in 2007."

Just compare these two statements:

Joe Lieberman, today: "previously there weren't enough soldiers to hold key neighborhoods after they had been cleared of extremists and militias."

Joe Lieberman, 2005: "The administration's recent use of the banner 'clear, hold, and build' accurately describes the strategy as I saw it being implemented last week."

How can Joe Lieberman claim today that we previously lacked sufficient troop strength to hold neighborhoods after they were cleared, when he insisted a year ago that we were holding neighborhoods -- he saw it himself -- and that we were therefore on the verge of success?