Juan Cole: Lieberman is "brain dead on the Iraq issue."

[BurtWorm]

http://www.juancole.com/2006/08/liebermans-defeat-it-is-very-important.html

Lieberman's Defeat

It is very important that Joe Lieberman was defeated in the Democratic primary in Connecticut on Tuesday, for the following reasons.

First of all, the man was brain dead on the Iraq issue. He seems seriously to have believed that the violence in Iraq only affected a third of the country (he appears not to have heard of Maysan or Basra provinces), and kept saying the most wildly optimistic things about the near future in the face of masses of evidence that Iraq was sinking faster than a two-ton truck in a quicksand patch. This Panglossian narrative about Iraq gave enormous aid and comfort to Bush and the Republican Party.

Second and more important, Lieberman had aimed a poisoned arrow at the heart of every Democratic candidate when he said,


' "While dissent about the war is critically important and American, partisan dissent has no place when it comes to our national security, particularly when we have 130,000 Americans over there in uniform," he said. "So I refuse to take partisan shots at the president or anybody else about the war." '



Lieberman's stance would have been quoted ad nauseam in Republican Party advertisements. They would have used a leading Democrat to swiftboat the rest of the Party.

Lieberman had bought into the Rove Master Narrative. Bush went to war electively, thus very conveniently making himself a war president and therefore above criticism. He got a second term that way despite having been among the worst presidents in history. Lieberman ceded to Bush a kind of invulnerability on the most important Republican Party SNAFU since its policies contributed to the onset of the Great Depression. Why would a Democrat do that?

The answer is that on foreign policy issues, Lieberman is a Neoconservative, and supports the Iraq project for the same reasons that Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz (then number 3 and 2 respectively at the Pentagon) did. He tried to put himself in the tradition of Hubert Humphrey, but he was more honest when he also listed Scoop Jackson. Perle and the rest started on Jackson's staff....

[BurtWorm]

1. kick

[Nutmegger]

2. Well said

:bounce:

[rodeodance]

3. I respect Cole-who is an expert on the ME, not like others such as Condi/

[QuestionAll...]

4. he's not brain dead, he's soul dead.

he knows where his butter is and it isn't on the peace side.

[BurtWorm]

5. Amen

:kick:

[Canuckistanian]

6. Lieberman a neocon?

I never would have guessed that, but it makes sense. He never really indulged in the pro-Israel craziness in his public statements. He always seemed to hide or at least downplay his Jewish roots while marching in lockstep with the fundies.

Has anyone ever asked him how he feels about the PNAC document?