More common sense from Joe Lieberman

This morning’s Washington Post has another op/ed from Joe Lieberman – one that I find hard to argue with.

Last week a series of coordinated suicide bombings killed more than 170 people. The victims were not soldiers or government officials but civilians — innocent men, women and children indiscriminately murdered on their way home from work and school.

If such an atrocity had been perpetrated in the United States, Europe or Israel, our response would surely have been anger at the fanatics responsible and resolve not to surrender to their barbarism.

Well, if it had been perpetrated in the US, it would depend on which party was running the White House that would determine where the blame would be placed. When Bill Clinton was president and the World Trade center was attacked, Americans generally blamed Islamic terrorists. When the WTC was attacked a second time while George W. Bush was President, Americans generally disagreed about who was at fault. Not that anyone is playing politics with American lives or anything (eyes roll skyward).

Fortunately, former Democrat Joe Lieberman sees the same political game playing out in this case, too;

Unfortunately, because this slaughter took place in Baghdad, the carnage was seized upon as the latest talking point by advocates of withdrawal here in Washington. Rather than condemning the attacks and the terrorists who committed them, critics trumpeted them as proof that Gen. David Petraeus’s security strategy has failed and that the war is “lost.”

In fact, a skeptic might say that al Qaida and the Democrats are acting in tandem to defeat our policy in Iraq.

And today, perversely, the Senate is likely to vote on a binding timeline of withdrawal from Iraq.

This reaction is dangerously wrong. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of both the reality in Iraq and the nature of the enemy we are fighting there.

What is needed in Iraq policy is not overheated rhetoric but a sober assessment of the progress we have made and the challenges we still face.

Unfortunately, overheated rhetoric is the only thing we get from Democrats because the place politics before our national security. That was illustrated in the 218-208 vote in the House yesterday to pass a bill that the President has declared dead on arrival. The Democrats know what the President will and will not sign, they’re the ones who are constantly whining about the lack of bi-partisanship, so why didn’t they craft legislation that they know the President will sign instead of some political payment to the extremes of their party’s contituency?

Lieberman also summarizes what no one else on the Left cares to admit;

Al-Qaeda’s strategy for victory in Iraq is clear. It is trying to kill as many innocent people as possible in the hope of reigniting Shiite sectarian violence and terrorizing the Sunnis into submission.

In other words, just as Petraeus and his troops are working to empower and unite Iraqi moderates by establishing basic security, al-Qaeda is trying to divide and conquer with spectacular acts of butchery.

It makes all of us intellectually honest people wonder why the Democrats would buy into such a defeatist and ill-considered strategy if their motives weren’t purely political.

Senator Lieberman sums his piece up nicely;

Al-Qaeda, after all, isn’t carrying out mass murder against civilians in the streets of Baghdad because it wants a more equitable distribution of oil revenue. Its aim in Iraq isn’t to get a seat at the political table; it wants to blow up the table — along with everyone seated at it.

The Democrats know that, even if the Code Pink and KosKids don’t. But their answer to complex problems is simple. S.A. Miller of the Washington Times quoted David Obey this morning in the Washington Times;

“This bill gives the president the exit strategy from the Iraqi civil war that up until now he has not had,” said Rep. David R. Obey, Wisconsin Democrat and House Appropriations Committee chairman.

See? The war in Iraq is just politics as usual. Disregard the lives, disregard that the downtrodden and oppressed of the world will toss away all hope when we leave the Iraqis to the will of the Islamist extremists – like we left the South Vietnamese in ’75, the Iraqi Shi’ites in ’91, the Somalis in ’93, the Haitians in ’95. Just to appease al-Qaida and the Code Pink crybabies.

John Murtha as much as admits that its purely political to AP’s Anne Flaherty (via the Washington Examiner);

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said Democrats were still considering their next step. He said after Bush’s veto, one option would be funding the war through September as Bush wants but setting benchmarks that the Iraqi government must meet.

“I think everything that passes will have some sort of condition (placed) on it,” he said. Ultimately, Murtha added, the 2008 military budget considered by Congress in June “is where you’ll see the real battle,” he said.

So they sent this to the President knowing it’d get vetoed. If they were serious about ending this war successfully, they would have hammered out something the President would sign, or something they could over-ride his veto with a 2/3 majority. Instead, they want to make empty political, pointless statements. Just wasting time. How many troops will get killed, how many more attacks will be planned against us while the Democrats play partisan towel-snapping? 

Category: Foreign Policy, John Murtha, Politics, Terror War