Lieberman's problem: he refuses to lie

Robert Kagan herein relates the truth about Joe Lieberman and Connecticut Democrats.

It is simply this: Senator Lieberman isn't in trouble in Connecticut because he supported going to war in Iraq. Just about every prominent Democrat in America supported going to war in Iraq.

Nor is Senator Lieberman in trouble for being unwilling to cut and run (and yes, I use the term advisedly- and I should forthrightly say that I was wrong about this; I once thought that we would be well on our way out of Iraq within the next year. But a bi-partisan consensus of grownups recognizes that to reduce troop levels any time in the next year would be the height of irresponsibility, and would likely plunge Iraq into the civil war that the Left has been hyperbolically claiming was already going on there for months. To reduce troop levels right now would perhaps differ in degree, but not in kind, from a total, craven bug-out). There are lots of leading Democrats who- despite their general anti-administration anti-war general rhetoric, differ not a whit as to the practicalities of the present situation in Iraq from George W. Bush.

It is not his general hawkishness which is his "crime;" if it were, John Murtha and Al Gore would be anathema to the party to which they are heroes. It was, as Kagan points out, Lieberman's hawkishness which commended him to Gore as a running-mate back in the days when both of them wanted to string Saddam Hussein up from the nearest lamppost. and any suggestion that he's been the administration's pet poodle on anything is so absurd that even liberals must be embarrassed by it. Lieberman's feckless opponent, Ned Lamont, found out to his sorrow in their debate just how self-evidently absurd that charge really is when examined in light of the record.

Lieberman is in trouble, as Kagan rightly says, because he's honest. He drew the conclusions practically everybody in his party drew at the time the war broke out- indeed, the only conclusions the facts, as we knew them at the time, warranted. He is honest enough to recognize that everybody knew the fragility of the Iraqi "nation" (if what is really three or four seperate nations cobbled artificially into a single state can truly be called that), and the difficulties involved in achieving stability once Saddam was gone at the outset (okay, maybe President Bush himself wasn't personally quite as aware of them as he might have been, but the bi-partisan consensus which supported him certainly was).

Lieberman is in trouble because he has been unwilling to pretend that "George Bush L-I-I-I-E-E-D,!" and to take refuge, along with his fellow Democrats, in the plea that he was hoodwinked by the diabolically crafty drooling imbecile in the White House. He's in trouble because he has the integrity to accept responsibility for his own actions and his own record.

And face it: at a moment at which re-writing the history of the Iraq conflict, from the dates on most of the WMD's we went into Iraq to find (and some of which we have indeed found- despite the oft-repeated absurdity that only post-1991 munitions should count) to the nature of the unenforced demands the 1991 peace treaty and seventeen UN Security Council resolutions over twelve years (they did not require Saddam to let Hans Blix freely engage, in President Bush's words, in "a scavenger hunt throughout a country the size of California" for WMD's he hadn't acquired yet, but rather to destroy the ones everyone knew he had, and which he himself admitted having, under UN supervision- which he never did), for a Democrat to refuse to misrepresent the history of our involvement in Iraq is tantamout to treason against his party.

One thing Democrats cannot afford to be is honest about the history of Iraq. And that Joe Lieberman refuses to be otherwise is the real reason why he has to go.

ADDENDUM: As an illustration of this very point, check out the Lieberman article at Wikipedia- and note the items which are somehow "under dispute!"

It's worth reading the article as a whole as a review of Lieberman's record in the Senate. The entire Lamont argument is patently based on misrepresenting it.

ADDENDUM II: David Gergen has put his finger on the underlying dynamic behind the movement to purge Joe Lieberman: fanatical partisan extremism.

ADDENDUM III: Here is an example. Note Jepsen's arguments on one side, and the record- as presented by Gergen and the Wikipedia article- on the other.

Compare and contrast.


HT: Real Clear Politics