Senator Joe Lieberman Has Lost the Plot

Three years into the "war on terror" and in particular the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it's useful for those on both sides of the debate, to take stock and reflect. Despite it being crystal clear that the invasion of Iraq was started under false pretences, that the intelligence used to justify it was ambiguous at best and manipulated, cooked and sexed-up at worst, that Saddam had no WMD of any discernable kind, that Iraq posed no threat to the US, UK and its allies in any way, that the 45 minute warning was a joke designed to scaremonger an ignorant general public into support for this misadventure, that Saddam had no ties with al-Qaeda and had nothing to do whatsoever with the attacks on 9/11, despite all of this, the Allies are still firmly entrenched in Iraq in a war that has achieved little and whose architects have no plans to leave Iraq to the Iraqis, for better or for worse.

And the neocon engineers of this debacle, one of the biggest and most costly foreign policy blunders of the last fifty years, continue unashamedly to further mislead the public as to the true nature of this war and persist in calling for further presence in Iraq.

What we're seeing here is of course nothing more than a political battle, Bush the puppet and his company of puppet masters will never admit to any wrongdoing, instead they simply keep twisting and turning the issues and moving the goalposts, so as to make out something positive will have been achieved: from catching al-Qaeda as failed primary objective, Iraq is now to be presented as a centre-piece for "democracy in the Middle East" and the "March of Freedom".

Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman is one of those politicians who, somewhere along the line, has lost the thread and is starting to believe that Iraq should not be considered a failure, despite the decidedly dodgy tactics that were employed to justify this gaffe.

In this article: "Our Troops Must Stay", Lieberman presents us with a piece of demagoguery, designed to appeal to the average conservative American, who when confronted with the imaginary international bogeyman of "terrorism", knee-jerks swiftly further to the right and into "war-mode".

Lieberman asserts with characteristically simpleton math that the US mustn't abandon "27 million Iraqis to 10,000 terrorists"...

The fact that the 10,000 insurgents are quite a heterogeneous group, made up of resistance fighters fighting the troops, those waging internal, civil war and a smaller contingent of foreign, al-Qaeda style fighters, is a subtlety Lieberman cannot afford, because it's the association "Iraq - Terrorism" he want to make appear in the reader's mind.

And the fact that the vast majority of these alleged "terrorists" simply weren't there before the invasion, is also something Lieberman is either too incompetent to see or too disingenuous to show.

Then there's Lieberman's shining example of democracy in the Middle East: that long-time and most loyal of US allies, Israel. That democratic country that keeps occupying and permanently annexating territory that by rights belongs to someone else, the Palestinians.

For the latter, if the "war on terror" has done anything it's to make matters worse. Branded as nothing but a bunch of "unreliable terrorists and al-Qaeda supporters", they shouldn't expect any support from the American and British people. Lump it all together and you get an undifferentiated mass of "terrorists" that should be fought tooth and nail, "hunted down and smoked out", Dumbya-style. The first casualty of this war was indeed the truth...

Lieberman, some Demoprat you are...

Grudging hat tip to Righting America.

Keywords: Lieberman, Iraq, terrorism