Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) made a surprise visit to Iraq yesterday and, wouldn’t you know it, he was encouraged by all the “progress” he just knew would be there waiting for him. “Overall, I would say what I see here today is progress, significant progress from the last time I was here in December,” he said.
Asked about the enormous casualties throughout the month of May, Lieberman said fatalities are part of the progress. “Part of that, as I’ve been told today, is because our military is out here not just in camps but we’re out in in the city and other cities but particularly in the capital city, and we’re having a positive effect,” he explained.
As we know, Lieberman won’t listen to his colleagues who know better, won’t listen to his constituents who know better, and won’t listen to policy experts who know better. But will he listen to the troops themselves?
Spc. David Williams, 22, of Boston, Mass., had two note cards in his pocket Wednesday afternoon as he waited for Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Williams serves in the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, N.C., the first of the five “surge” brigades to arrive in Iraq, and he was chosen to join the Independent from Connecticut for lunch at a U.S. field base in Baghdad.
The night before, 30 other soldiers crowded around him with questions for the senator.
He wrote them all down. At the top of his note card was the question he got from nearly every one of his fellow soldiers:
“When are we going to get out of here?”
The rest was a laundry list. When would they have upgraded Humvees that could withstand the armor-penetrating weapons that U.S. officials claim are from Iran? When could they have body armor that was better in hot weather?
Lieberman told reporters how much he understood the troops’ perspective. “They’re not Pollyannaish about this,” he said referring to the young soldiers he ate lunch with. “They know it’s not going to be solved in a day or a month.”
But by all indications, Lieberman was projecting his own beliefs onto the troops who clearly felt differently.
Spc. Will Hedin, 21, of Chester, Conn., thought about what he was going to say.
“We’re not making any progress,” Hedin said, as he recalled a comrade who was shot by a sniper last week. “It just seems like we drive around and wait to get shot at.”
But as he waited two chairs down from where Lieberman would sit, Hedin said he’d never voice his true feelings to the senator.
“I think I’d be a private if I did,” he joked. “It’s just more troops, more targets.”
In other words, Lieberman assumes he knows what the troops are thinking — they agree with everything he thinks — but that’s largely because of an environment in which soldiers believe they’ll be punished for telling policy makers the truth.
Spc. Kevin Krasco, 20, of Medford, Mass., and Spc. Kevin Adams, 20, of Moosup, Conn., chimed in with their dismay…. “It’s like everything else in this war,” Adams said, referring to Baghdad. “It hasn’t changed.” […]
It isn’t clear whether Williams mentioned the last line on his note card, the one that had a star next to it.
“We don’t feel like we’re making any progress,” it said.
Lieberman apparently left his meeting with the troops thinking, evidence to the contrary, that he’s still right about the war. Of course, given what we know of the senator, even if the troops had been free to share their actual opinions, Lieberman would probably feel the same way.