Lieberman: Give Peace Surge a Chance
Sen. Joe Lieberman today penned an oped for the always Republican friendly pages of the Wall Street Journal in which he pleads with his fellow members of Congress to give the surge strategy a chance to work. A few excerpts (with commentary from moi mixed in) below.
Just with this lede you can already see how Ole Lieby is going to frame the debate.
Makes you wonder whatever happened to that "clear, hold, and build" strategy that Lieberman heralded way back in 2005 doesn't it?
Funny, that appears to be the Bush administration strategy too. Lieby goes on to contradict himself about how soon we will see whether the surge strategy is working when first he says:
Only to then say toward the end of his screed:
And what of his peers in Congress?
(Filed at State of the Day)
Two months into the 110th Congress, Washington has never been more bitterly divided over our mission in Iraq. The Senate and House of Representatives are bracing for parliamentary trench warfare--trapped in an escalating dynamic of division and confrontation that will neither resolve the tough challenges we face in Iraq nor strengthen our nation against its terrorist enemies around the world.
Just with this lede you can already see how Ole Lieby is going to frame the debate.
If we stopped the legislative maneuvering and looked to Baghdad, we would see what the new security strategy actually entails and how dramatically it differs from previous efforts. For the first time in the Iraqi capital, the focus of the U.S. military is not just training indigenous forces or chasing down insurgents, but ensuring basic security--meaning an end, at last, to the large-scale sectarian slaughter and ethnic cleansing that has paralyzed Iraq for the past year.
Makes you wonder whatever happened to that "clear, hold, and build" strategy that Lieberman heralded way back in 2005 doesn't it?
Tamping down this violence is more than a moral imperative. Al Qaeda's stated strategy in Iraq has been to provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war,...
Funny, that appears to be the Bush administration strategy too. Lieby goes on to contradict himself about how soon we will see whether the surge strategy is working when first he says:
We of course will not know whether this new strategy in Iraq will succeed for some time...
Only to then say toward the end of his screed:
Gen. Petraeus says he will be able to see whether progress is occurring by the end of the summer...
And what of his peers in Congress?
...for many congressional opponents of the war, none of this seems to matter. As the battle of Baghdad just gets underway, they have already made up their minds about America's cause in Iraq, declaring their intention to put an end to the mission before we have had the time to see whether our new plan will work.Call this the "triple dog dare" approach, since Lieby suggested last week such an outcome could lead him to switch parties and flip control of the Senate to the Republicans. In any event, all he's asking is for another Friedman in the hopes that this battle for Baghdad will be the one that sticks.
There is of course a direct and straightforward way that Congress could end the war, consistent with its authority under the Constitution: by cutting off funds.
(Filed at State of the Day)
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