If there is anyone in this country who has a right to a grudge against George W. Bush, it is Joe Lieberman, Connecticut’s junior Democrat in the United States Senate.
After all, Lieberman was sure he was going to be inaugurated as America’s first Jewish vice president in January 2001. He certainly came close enough to victory but along with Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, he found himself having to swallow an electoral college defeat following the bitter dispute in Florida which decided the election.
As such Lieberman is an icon not just of American Jewish achievement but as a “martyr” of what many bitter Democratic partisans still claim was a “stolen election.”
Buoyed by the rapturous reception that he had received in 2000, Lieberman tried for the top prize himself in 2004. He soon learned that despite his tacking to the left on many issues, his centrist politics were simply out of touch with Democratic primary voters. Soon after flopping in New Hampshire, his candidacy was over.
But Lieberman is back in the news this month in a way that seems more in tune with the independent-minded senator who became the first prominent Democrat to publicly scold President Bill Clinton for lying and immorality. Rather than following his fellow Democrats into opposition to the war in Iraq, Lieberman has become one of the most vigorous advocates for a policy of pursuing American military action until victory.
In speeches and a widely-read opinion column that was published in The Wall Street Journal on Nov. 29, Lieberman has debunked much of the rhetoric being spouted by his fellow Democrats and laid out the case for perseverance in Iraq.
That his outspoken advocacy has gotten far less play than fellow Democrat John Murtha’s call for an immediate pullout says something interesting about the tilt of the national media, but Lieberman’s position is no less important.
Far from being “immoral” as many have claimed the war to be, Lieberman believes the American purpose in Iraq is highly moral: the overthrow of a bloody and dangerous tyrant and the attempt to replace his regime with a functioning democratic state.
Far from the hopeless quagmire described by Bush’s critics, Lieberman sees the battle there as “a war between 27 million and 10,000; 27 million Iraqis who want to live lives of freedom, opportunity and prosperity and roughly 10,000 terrorists who are either Saddam revanchists, Iraqi Islamic extremists or al Qaeda foreign fighters.”
Even more to the point, he has taken his party members to task for placing their hatred for Bush above the national interest.
He knows that prior to the war, Democrats and Republicans alike believed that Saddam Hussein was a threat and that his overthrow was necessary (a point that was made by Lieberman’s push in 1998 for the Iraq Liberation Act, which called for U.S. action to overthrow Saddam).
The talk of “lies that led to war” rings hollow with a man who believed the United States ought to work to create a situation where Iraqis would live in a post-Saddam democratic state long before the acronym “WMD” entered our consciousness.
Even more, Lieberman understands that the United States is engaged in a world war against Islamists who intend the destruction of the West. “If the terrorists win [in Iraq], they will be emboldened to strike us directly again and to further undermine the growing stability and progress in the Middle East,” Lieberman has warned the country.
As such, he believes that the duty of the loyal opposition is to unite behind the president on issues of national survival. “In matters of war, we undermine our president’s credibility at our nation’s peril,” Lieberman said in a recent speech.