Cross posted at The Smoking Room
All I can say after reading Senator Joe Lieberman’s WSJ piece on keeping troops in Iraq until democracy shines is, Lieberman ’08! Well, a little more…
As high-minded and principled as Lieberman’s article is, it’s clearly a direct attack on the line of thinking flogged by Rep. John Murtha, the isolationist hawk (think Dole circa ’96) whose call to pull out US troops in six months has emboldened antiwar advocates and an American press that, in a lapse of amnesia, forgot Murtha didn’t say anything new. Read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:
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. …
Does America have a good plan for doing this, a strategy for victory in Iraq? Yes we do. And it is important to make it clear to the American people that the plan has not remained stubbornly still but has changed over the years. 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. The administration’s recent use of the banner “clear, hold and build” accurately describes the strategy as I saw it being implemented last week.
He says about a third of the Iraqi military can “lead the fight” with logistical support from U.S. forces, and are holding secure several former hotbeds of terrorist activity, including most of the border with Syria. He’s optimistic about overcoming former bureaucratic blunders:
The economic reconstruction of Iraq has gone slower than it should have, and too much money has been wasted or stolen. Ambassador Khalilzad is now implementing reform that has worked in Afghanistan–Provincial Reconstruction Teams, composed of American economic and political experts, working in partnership in each of Iraq’s 18 provinces with its elected leadership, civil service and the private sector. That is the “build” part of the “clear, hold and build” strategy, and so is the work American and international teams are doing to professionalize national and provincial governmental agencies in Iraq.
Does anyone doubt that, if Lieberman and John McCain could overcome overwhelming opposition in their own parties to their nominations, they’d win in 2008 on a bipartisan ticket in a second?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.