Lieberman's Op-Ed

In today's Wall Street Journal, Joe Lieberman appeals to all of us Iraq naysayers to just shut up until summer. I would if he would, and he won't, so I won't:

Two months into the 110th Congress, Washington has never been more bitterly divided over our mission in Iraq.

This is the natural consequence of having committed hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives over four years, and having almost nothing to show for it.

Congress thus faces a choice in the weeks and months ahead. Will we allow our actions to be driven by the changing conditions on the ground in Iraq--or by the unchanging political and ideological positions long ago staked out in Washington? What ultimately matters more to us: the real fight over there, or the political fight over here?

No political position has been more fixed and more bloodthirsty, or so little affected by the "real fight over there," than Lieberman's.

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.

If only it would end, Mr. Lieberman. Unrealistic, pollyannish hopes hardly seem appropriate at this time, particularly since the U.S. seems to be in retreat to Baghdad.

Al Qaeda's stated strategy in Iraq has been to provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war, precisely because they recognize that it is their best chance to radicalize the country's politics, derail any hope of democracy in the Middle East, and drive the U.S. to despair and retreat. It also takes advantage of what has been the single greatest American weakness in Iraq: the absence of sufficient troops to protect ordinary Iraqis from violence and terrorism.

And yet, the U.S. Administration has never made averting a Civil War a priority, because it never understood that it was a possibility until far too late, nor supported placing sufficient troops in Iraq, because it did understand just how unpopular a move that would be at home. The Administration still doesn't understand how ineffective English-speaking U.S. troops are at securing basic security in a hostile foreign setting, but that will come soon enough (previous historic culture-clashing examples include the failed Napoleonic French occupation of Spain). It's sad how easily we play into Al Qaeda's hands....

The new strategy at last begins to tackle these problems. Where previously there weren't enough soldiers to hold key neighborhoods after they had been cleared of extremists and militias, now more U.S. and Iraqi forces are either in place or on the way. Where previously American forces were based on the outskirts of Baghdad, unable to help secure the city, now they are living and working side-by-side with their Iraqi counterparts on small bases being set up throughout the capital.

And so what happens in the outskirts of Baghdad now? Politics abhors a vacuum, after all!

At least four of these new joint bases have already been established in the Sunni neighborhoods in west Baghdad--the same neighborhoods where, just a few weeks ago, jihadists and death squads held sway. In the Shiite neighborhoods of east Baghdad, American troops are also moving in--and Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army are moving out.

Hmmmm..... I'm unconvinced. It's not as if the Mahdi army is an occupier - east Baghdad is it's home turf. The only way the U.S. can 'secure' these neighborhoods is by either killing everyone there, or chasing everybody away.

But the fact is that we are in a different place in Iraq today from even just a month ago--with a new strategy, a new commander, and more troops on the ground. We are now in a stronger position to ensure basic security--and with that, we are in a stronger position to marginalize the extremists and strengthen the moderates; a stronger position to foster the economic activity that will drain the insurgency and militias of public support; and a stronger position to press the Iraqi government to make the tough decisions that everyone acknowledges are necessary for progress.

A change of strategy is not a stronger position. The strategy is changing because the position is extremely weak. Will alone is insufficient against bullets and bombs.

Unfortunately, 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.

Four years, buster! Four years! How many times do we have to go down this same lethal road?

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. Yet this option is not being proposed. Critics of the war instead are planning to constrain and squeeze the current strategy and troops by a thousand cuts and conditions.

Whatever works!

In fact, halting the current security operation at midpoint, as virtually all of the congressional proposals seek to do, would have devastating consequences. It would put thousands of American troops already deployed in the heart of Baghdad in even greater danger--forced to choose between trying to hold their position without the required reinforcements or, more likely, abandoning them outright. A precipitous pullout would leave a gaping security vacuum in its wake, which terrorists, insurgents, militias and Iran would rush to fill--probably resulting in a spiral of ethnic cleansing and slaughter on a scale as yet unseen in Iraq.

The lesson of Vietnam - the lesson of the Cambodian incursion - is that the longer we stay, the more likely the worst-case outcome will be. If we had not invaded Cambodia, it would not have been drawn into that war and there would not have been a genocide. The longer we persist in Iraq, the more likely we will indirectly get tens of thousands killed, and maybe many more, by pressing on and on, harder and harder, perhaps by invading Iran as well, until we trigger truly calamitous disaster....

Gen. Petraeus says he will be able to see whether progress is occurring by the end of the summer, so let us declare a truce in the Washington political war over Iraq until then.

Are you kidding? And let you creeps throw more lives into the bonfire unopposed?

We are at a critical moment in Iraq--at the beginning of a key battle, in the midst of a war that is irretrievably bound up in an even bigger, global struggle against the totalitarian ideology of radical Islamism.

Fantasy. Delusion. Madness.