Sen. Lieberman on what’s wrong with the Democratic Party:
By contrast, in 2000, Gov. George W. Bush promised a “humble foreign policy” and criticized our peacekeeping operations in the Balkans.Today, less than a decade later, the parties have completely switched positions. The reversal began, like so much else in our time, on September 11, 2001. The attack on America by Islamist terrorists shook President Bush from the foreign policy course he was on. He saw September 11 for what it was: a direct ideological and military attack on us and our way of life. If the Democratic Party had stayed where it was in 2000, America could have confronted the terrorists with unity and strength in the years after 9/11.
Instead a debate soon began within the Democratic Party about how to respond to Mr. Bush. I felt strongly that Democrats should embrace the basic framework the president had advanced for the war on terror as our own, because it was our own. But that was not the choice most Democratic leaders made. When total victory did not come quickly in Iraq, the old voices of partisanship and peace at any price saw an opportunity to reassert themselves. By considering centrism to be collaboration with the enemy – not bin Laden, but Mr. Bush – activists have successfully pulled the Democratic Party further to the left than it has been at any point in the last 20 years.
(This is adapted from the speech he gave at the Commentary Fund Dinner.)
John Podhoretz, yesterday, explained why Sen. Lieberman is not – as some of his critics assert – a hack:
By remaining steadfast on the war in Iraq when others in his party fled their vote and then blamed their inconstancy on the supposed “lies†of the administration. And by refusing to join the jackal-like feast on George W. Bush’s reputation, Lieberman earned the hatred of many fellow Democrats. That hatred caused a hugely rich man in his state to spend millions of his own money to oust Lieberman from his own party’s nomination after serving three full terms as senator.And yet there he remained, and remains, unbending. This is the opposite of hackery. It is the antithesis of hackery. It is the quality everyone says he yearns for in Washington — principled consistency, a willingness to work across the aisle in a bipartisan fashion, and a refusal to kowtow to the loudest voices merely because they are so loud. Last night, at the annual dinner of the Commentary Fund, Lieberman said he remained a Democrat precisely because he believes the strong foreign policy he espouses must have a bipartisan foundation.
California Conservative adds his thoughts. One nitpick though: He casts Clinton with other pacifists. Clinton, at least in the case of the NATO war against Serbia was willing to go to war to spread freedom. It was a stance that Sen. Lieberman praised in his speech.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad
People don’t get angry at Joe Lieberman because he’s a hawkish Democrat, people call him a hack because he does things like running in a general election after losing the primary or writing an op-ed that effectively endorses an opposing party’s candidate. There are better ways to try to bring his own party around to his personal views on Iraq and the War on Terror.
But a deeper problem is that he doesn’t seem to realize that it’s not just his party’s left wing that’s opposed to staying in Iraq, it’s a good chunk of the American public.
The Iraq Campaign is an essential front in the war against the jihadist terrorists. To be against it is to be against the war as a whole. The Democrats want the US to surrender and lose the war, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They think this will bring them political benefits. They put their selfish partisanship ahead of ther good of the country.
It’s not only Bush who views it as the central front; bin Laden and Zawahiri do too. For one thing we must pit our big idea against that of the jihadists. Theirs is a worldwide caliphate where Muslims will lord it over the wretched dhimmis and get all the goodies for themselves, which will be their consolation for the oppression visited on them by the ruling Islamists. It is flattering and attractive to Muslims. We offer liberty and prosperity in the modern world, which is also very attractive, especially to thinking people. Lots of Iraqis like the idea of liberty after 24 years of Saddam and 50 years of various thug rulers, from Qassem onward. Iraq is the nexus where these ideas meet. The Democrats want to lose that struggle. Therefore they want to lose the larger war.
Lieberman was purged from the Democratic Party for the sin of excessive loyalty to the USA.
Do not delude yourself. As soon as we’ve run away in Iraq the same people will scream for us to run away in Afghanistan. (Before we sent any troops there the Left was staging big demonstrations protesting the war in Afghanistan. They included people calling for Israel’s destruction, by the way.) Such pusillanimity will garner us no respect in the Middle East, and only contempt for cowardice. It will bring more and bigger terrorist attacks, for their strategy will have worked, won’t it? Kill a few Americans and the country will run away like a sissy. Kill more and they will expect us to act even more cowardly. Kill lots and they will expect us to fold. Why not? We will already have done it before, if the Democrats run away from Iraq. That is the view the Democrats will confirm if a President Obama pulls out of Iraq. And if the leaders of the Democrats are even halfway as intelligent as they are reputed to be, they know it full well.