National Journal recently asked top Republicans in Washington who their favorite Dem is. Not surprisingly, Joe Lieberman came in first (via The Reaction).
As if to underscore why, Lieberman wrote a lengthy Wall Street Journal op-ed today, praising the war effort and characterizing the entire effort as going very well. ABC’s The Note said the White House communications director couldn’t have written it better herself, which offers a big hint about Lieberman’s approach to the war.
There are a few ways to look at the op-ed, but like TNR’s Spencer Ackerman, I think Lieberman’s timing was among the more glaring problems.
Lieberman, for example, characterized the insurgency as a small band of terrorists, whom Americans are fighting with the support of nearly all Iraqis.
It is a war between 27 million and 10,000; 27 million Iraqis who want to live lives of freedom, opportunity and prosperity and roughly 10,000 terrorists who are either Saddam revanchists, Iraqi Islamic extremists or al Qaeda foreign fighters who know their wretched causes will be set back if Iraq becomes free and modern. The terrorists are intent on stopping this by instigating a civil war to produce the chaos that will allow Iraq to replace Afghanistan as the base for their fanatical war-making.
This probably would have been a more compelling pitch if Lieberman’s op-ed didn’t appear in the news the same day as reports about Iraqi death squads.
A Western diplomat in Baghdad who spoke on condition of anonymity said that “we hear repeated stories” of police raids on houses and indiscriminate arrests of Iraqi civilians–many of them Sunni Arab Muslims. […]
The Al Mahdi army has a heavy presence in the regular police force, U.S. and Iraqi authorities said. One high-ranking U.S. military officer estimated that up to 90% of the 35,000 police officers working in northeast Baghdad were affiliated with Al Mahdi.
The U.S. officer said that “half of them are in a unit called ‘the Punishment Committee,'” suspected of committing abuses against civilians believed to be flouting Islamic laws or the militia’s authority. The officer said that Sunni Arab Muslims were frequently targeted by the committee.
As Ackerman asked, “Senator, where do the death squads fit in on your division between the freedom-seeking 27 million and the 10,000 terrorists?”