Axis of Assholes: Joe Lieberman (Part I)

I have a confession: I've never much liked the junior senator from Connecticut Joe Lieberman. I've always been skeptical of Lieberman's unctuous posing and preening on the political stage as he moralizes and lectures the rest of us on our own very real shortcomings. But like so many other holier-than-thou moralizers on the right, Lieberman has his own issues that contradict his very public persona.

Now we are all full of contradictions but Lieberman's actions rarely dovetail with his holier-than-thou grandstanding. Or, then again perhaps it is his vicious and reactionary nature that I find so disturbing, whether it be from his right-wing culture warring against Hollywood to his sandbagging of Clinton's health care initiative in 1994 (hey Hartford IS the insurance capital after all) to his fights with Arthur Levitt over at the SEC to ensure dubious accounting loopholes which would benefit his contributors to his sanctimonious lecturing of President Clinton on Monica Lewinsky (piously declaring in the Senate that he was "personally angry" about Clinton's "immoral" and "disgraceful" behavior) to his undermining of the Gore campaign in 2000 (could Lieberman not get his nose up Cheney's ass fast enough?) and the Kerry campaign in 2004 (when he expressed support for President Bush two weeks before the election while chastising Kerry for not supporting Israel enough).

But I really think it is the more recent behavior that I find so disturbing: his blind support of Iraq while suggesting his detractors are guilty of "cutting and running", his decrying of ‘Terrible, Partisan, Political Sniping,’ while cozying up to Fox News and the likes of O'Reilly (way too many foolish comments to include here), Hannity (who has described Harry Reid as “a propaganda minister for our enemies.”) and the anti-semite Coulter (The media is “treasoness," “the Democrats, they want us to lose,” the 9/11 widows are ’self-obsessed’ while accusing them of ‘enjoying their husband’s deaths and her latest, calling for the perfection of the Jews) and more recently, the pathetic rebuke of Moveon.org and its supporters for its provocative challenge to General David Petraeus.

The simple point is Lieberman is not and was never the stalwart and principled man that his supporters believe him to be. I don't know what drives this man but I've broken down my own problems with Lieberman issue by issue. Apologies for the length of this piece but it really speaks volumes to what I see as the hypocritical nature of this so-called principled man, Holy Joe. For a little man, Joe Lieberman really is one huge asshole.

Iraq:
Let's start with something very important, the big issue of the day. Like many of the other neo con enablers of the Iraq war, Joe Lieberman is another without any form of military service listed on his resume. But like so many others he happily commits men and women to fight overseas without fully realizing the consequences of his actions. So like Bush, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz and others Lieberman is a chicken hawk. For the record, Lieberman did not serve in the military and, like his buddy Dick Cheney, received a college and family exemption. That's kind of relevant for what follows...

Lieberman is obscenely obsessed about supporting the Iraq War: he has remained a firm and optimistic supporter, in spite of the ever-increasing evidence that the war has been poorly handled since its start and the fact that our soldiers are in harms way as we witness a civil war unfold. Lieberman was not bothered by the absence of WMD, by the Bush's Administrations' evolving raison d'etre for being there or the fact that the war continues to drag on with no end (or even end strategy) in sight. Instead he blithely parrots the Bush party line.

He was the lead Democratic co-sponsor of the 2002 Senate resolution authorizing the war, and seems to have had no second thoughts. Indeed, it is impossible to find a Republican who is quite as sunny about Iraq’s future as Lieberman is. Even McCain, who supports the war and the surge, is openly frustrated with the Administration’s prosecution of the war, and has been especially critical of Cheney. Lieberman won’t criticize anyone involved but the comprehensively discredited former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And he would only do it AFTER Rumsfeld had been fired.

For me, Lieberman’s most annoying quality is not his early support for the war—Clinton, Dodd, and Edwards, among other senators, voted for the Iraq-war resolution. It is that no development—not the absence of weapons of mass destruction, or the Administration’s innumerable and well-documented mistakes in post-invasion Iraq—has lessened his admiration for President Bush or his belief that the war has aided America in its fight against Islamic terrorism. That's just so mindless. And so wrong. If nothing, this fight has made us only more vulnerable to attack. We now have more enemies of our state. Iraq is a recruiting poster for Al Qaeda and other terrorists. Are we safer? No. Is Israel safer? Hardly! One can not ignore the tremendous amount of worldwide public sympathy after 9/11 that Bush squandered, leaving us more isolated and alienated. We can give Joe Lieberman an assist on that.

And now that the NY Times has finally come to its senses and outed the ethically challenged Judith Miller (for those with short term memory loss, Cheney used his aide Scooter Libby to plant stories in the New York Times by co-opting the ambitious but gullible Miller and then the administration would point to them as evidence that even left wing media believed their crap), Lieberman has sadly become the go-to whore who Cheney now uses to defend his and Bush's plans for further escalating the war in Iraq.

In Newsweek interview earlier this year, Cheney was quoted, " I thought that Joe Lieberman's comments ... were very important. Joe basically said the plan deserved an opportunity to succeed ... that we're sending Gen. Petraeus out with probably a unanimous or near-unanimous [confirmation] vote, and that it didn't make sense for Congress to simultaneously then pass a resolution disapproving of the strategy in Iraq."

And Lieberman is so relentless with his misguided views that even the mainstream media is questioning his judgment. The July 2 issue of Newsweek was more than a bit skeptical: "Early last week, a distressing, if not entirely unsurprising, Newsweek poll found that fully 40 percent of American adults continue to believe that Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks. It must, then, have been this exasperating chunk of the electorate that Joe Lieberman had in mind when he declared Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that Democrats are doomed in the 2008 presidential race unless they re-embrace the Iraq War."

Huh? The Democrats need to embrace the war to win the election? But wait a minute, most Americans favor an end to the conflict. Oh never mind.

The article continues, quoting the man himself and ends with a less than subtle dig: “I think that’s the best tradition of our party, and if we don’t recapture it ... the Democratic candidate is going to have a hard time winning that election next year,” Lieberman said, likening his own hawkish Iraq posture to Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Henry “Scoop” Jackson – all of them much too deceased to protest such a questionable comparison."

To top it all off, if losing to the Republicans isn’t enough, Mr. Lieberman also made clear that any Democratic nominee who favors “retreat” risks losing his personal endorsement.

Oh I'm sure the candidates are all so worried that the opportunistic junior Senator will withhold his support. With any luck, his support will soon be meaningless, the proverbial fart in a windstorm.

The Surge:
It follows if the man loves the war, he loves the surge. Since Lieberman thinks the war in Iraq is going well, naturally he supported the Bush/McCain "surge" plan which escalated the war by sending in more troops.

In CSPAN’s coverage of the McCain/Lieberman “surge” party at the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think tank), Lieberman praised Bush as a “great leader” for bucking American opinion, as expressed in the 2006 election, in his determination to double down in Iraq. Lieberman then said something really shameful: Even those opposed to the surge, he said, “ought to at least let us try it.”

“The worst that could happen,” he continued, is that this policy could become another partisan flashpoint in Washington.

The worst that could happen? I think not. The worst that could happen is thousands more US soldiers come home in body bags, not to mention the Iraqi casualties and the further damage--if this is possible--to the American reputation worldwide.

The worst that could happen is that thousands more Americans will die before moralistic paper tigers like Lieberman figure out what the rest of us already know: that this war was lost from the get go because it was run by chicken hawks like yourself who had no idea what they were doing.

Lieberman continuously asks for our patience, to let the strategy unfold and work. But it isn't. The surge he supports isn't working, despite Petraeus' cherry picked statistics and the Bush Administration blather.

Asking us to wait and listen to the generals is more than a bit ironic because if Bush and other neo cons like Lieberman had actually listened to the generals in the first place (Colin Powell, Eric Shinseki among others), then we never would have gotten into this war in the first place. So the hypocritical Lieberman stands on very infirm ground when he sternly lectures us on listening to the generals when he himself never did.

In early 2007, Lieberman went to Iraq, sporting more armament than Michael Dukakis driving a tank in 1988. He went to a market and proclaimed it safe though journalists pointed out there were no customers and the market was opened only as a photo op for Lieberman's visit.

Wearing a pair of sunglasses newly purchased from an Iraqi market, Lieberman said, “Overall, I would say what I see here today is progress, significant progress from the last time I was here in December. And if you can see progress in war that means you’re headed in the right direction.”

As ThinkProgress noted, several U.S. soldiers confronted him with a very different message: “We don’t feel like we’re making any progress.” The soldiers wanted to know, “When are we going to get out of here?” Lieberman chose to ignore them.

Upon his return he spoke to Anderson Cooper at CNN. "The war is not lost in Iraq" he said. "In fact, now American Iraqi security forces are winning. The enemy is on the run in Iraq. But, here in — in Congress, in Washington, we seem to be, or some — some members seem to be on the run, chased, I fear, by public opinion polls."

Or, on the other hand members like Lieberman might simply be delusional. Time Magazine reporter Michael Ware, who has covered Iraq for years, was interviewed by Anderson Cooper on CNN challenged Lieberman's rosy view.

When asked by Cooper if the enemy is indeed on the run in Iraq, Ware
declared categorically: "No, certainly not. And I think we need to be aware that it’s enemies. I mean, America doesn’t face just one opponent in this country, but a whole multitude, many of whom are becoming stronger, the longer the U.S. occupation here, or presence here, in Iraq continues. So, unfortunately, I’m afraid that Senator Lieberman has taken an excursion into fantasy."

Ouch! Is Lieberman living on the same planet we're living on?

Abu Ghraib:
If nothing defines the loss of American moral standing in the world, it is the prison scandal at Abu Ghraib. When the Abu Ghraib story broke with evidence that American soldiers were torturing prisoners of war, it at first appeared that the Senate Republicans might buck tradition and mount a serious inquiry. The Armed Services Committee, which had oversight responsibility for the issue, included several Republican moderates as well as independent-minded conservative Lindsey Graham who was visibly horrified by the revelations. So you'd think this would be a perfect opportunity for the junior senator to remind us of our ethical or moral obligations.

But no. Instead Lieberman minimized the importance of the affair from the start, purposefully ignoring the ugly truth of Abu Ghraib to make a political point. In his opening statement, Lieberman said he could not “help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, never apologized,” a dubious argument carefully culled from the right-wing talk-radio handbook. He continued, “And those who murdered and burned and humiliated four Americans in Fallujah awhile ago never received an apology from anybody.”

And so the saintly Joe Lieberman, with a few short words, became the Senate's leading apologist for torture.

Iran:
With the death of 3500 soldiers on its hands, the blood of over 30000 wounded on its hands, the deaths of countless Iraqis on its hands, the destabilization of Iraq specifically and the entire Middle East generally on its hands, and with the tattered reputation of America isolated and alone on its hands, the neo-con movement that beat the drums of war is losing credibility.

Americans want out of Iraq. Polls show that 59 percent or more of Americans are in favor of a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

With the results of 2006 mid term elections, the American public marked neo-conservatism as a fatally flawed foreign policy. However its adherents like Lieberman are not going quietly into the night. Realizing that the end of the Bush presidency means an end to the neo-conservatism for a long while, the neo-cons are planning one last hurrah. And that is poised to take place in Iran.

The republicans run on fear. The 2004 Presidential election was about fear. Rudy Guiliani's entire campaign is based on fear, running--as others have noted--for President of 9/11. So now that the Iraq war is a disaster, the powers that be want to find us a new enemy, so they can strike fear into our hearts once again. That fear is Iran.

The British daily The Sunday Telegraph (a conservative-leaning newspaper I should add) wrote, "Senior American intelligence and defense officials believe that President George W Bush and his inner circle are taking steps to place America on the path to war with Iran."

That crazed neo-con inner circle, led by Cheney, wants us to attack Iran. And of course they found an ally in Joe Lieberman who has been quite vocal in urging military strikes against Iran. Earlier this year Lieberman appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation, that the U.S. should “be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq.” “If there’s any hope” of stopping Iran’s nuclear program, “we can’t just talk to them. … We’ve got to use our force and to me that would include taking military action.”

So quietly, Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., filed an amendment to the 2008 Defense Reauthorization bill that gives a wink and a nod to the White House for the anticipated invasion if Iran.

The amendment proclaims "that it should be the policy of the United States to combat, contain, and roll back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

The Senate, therefore, should "support the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence, and military instruments, in support of the policy described ... with respect to the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

It is non-binding, but it is a "sense of the Senate" amendment basically saying the Senate views Iran as a danger to our war in Iraq, and that it is permissible for the president to use everything at his fingertips to oppose Iran, including military options, which means bombing and war.

Many Americans from all parts of the political spectrum are nervous about this saber rattling. Many generals including General John Abizaid, who retired from being in charge of the Iraq war in May, are on record as being against attacking Iran. On the conservative love fest TV news program known as the McLaughlin Group, Abizaid said he doubted Iran would ever attack the U.S., and he went on to say "Iran is not a suicide nation. They may have some people in charge that don't appear to be rational, but I doubt that the Iranians intend to attack us with a nuclear weapon. ...There are ways to live with a nuclear Iran. Let's face it. We lived with a nuclear Soviet Union. We've lived with a nuclear China. We're living with nuclear other powers as well."

This summer Lieberman wrote an op-ed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: “[E]very leader [in Washington] has a responsibility to acknowledge that…the Iranian government…has all but declared war on us and our allies in the Middle East.” He argues that the use of force against Iran is needed for one primary reason — to temper Iran’s “expansionist” desires to “dominate” its neighbors. He also argues that:

• Iran is acting aggressively and consistently to undermine moderate regimes in the Middle East, establish itself as the dominant regional power and reshape the region in its own ideological image.

• …[Iran] hopes to push the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan, so that its proxies can then dominate [neighboring] states. Tehran knows that an American retreat under fire would send an unmistakable message throughout the region that Iran is on the rise and America is on the run. That would be a disaster for the region and the U.S.

Sound familiar? Yeah probably because you've seen them before. Lieberman used nearly identical talking points to retroactively justify the U.S invasion of Iraq. In early 2004, after the search for WMDs proved fruitless, Lieberman argued that without U.S. intervention, Iraq would have embarked on its own campaign to dominate the “Arab world”:

• I believe that [Iraq] developed [weapons of mass destruction] to use them against their neighbors. I’m talking about the Iraqis, their neighbors in the Arab world and the Persian Gulf.

• Remember that Saddam was very clear that he had a plan. And the plan was to become the emperor, if you will, of the Arab world, to make Baghdad the capital of the Arab world.

Lieberman was wrong then and he is just as wrong now. Fortunately for us, Lieberman is standing increasingly alone — according to a recent poll, 72 percent of the American public “favor diplomacy to pressure with Iran.”

But Lieberman continues to beat the war drum. “The fact is that the Iranian government has by its actions declared war on us,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. While stopping short of advocating an immediate military strike, he claimed “our diplomatic efforts are only likely to succeed if backed by a credible threat of force.”

Gen. Wesley Clark responsed to Lieberman’s calls for attacking Iran, “Only someone who never wore the uniform or thought seriously about national security would make threats at this point. What our soldiers need is responsible strategy, not a further escalation of tensions in the region. Senator Lieberman must act more responsibly and tone down his threat machine.”

Why doesn't Joe Lieberman want to listen to the military this time? With the passage of Kyl/Lieberman, we can only conclude that war with Iran will face no opposition from the Senate.

Thanks Joe. Just what we need, another front.


(next: Part II looking at Lieberman on domestic and social issues)