Lieberman loves the surge

Lieberman's sorry excuse for an op-ed begs to be fisked, sentence by sentence, but I'm not going to give it that much bandwidth. I can't believe he even had the nerve to sign his name to it. It was probably was probably sent to him straight out of Cheney's office. And it's really hard to even take it seriously when a guy so far removed from reality starts out accusing the Democratic Party of being removed from what is actually happening in Iraq.

He bemoans the bitter dissent over the war in DC, as if it only exists inside the hallowed chambers of the Congress. It's about time we saw some bitter dissent in those halls. The people have been begging for it. Too bad it's only about four years too late to have saved us from this disaster. He then goes on to make every White House talking point on the official list.

This dramatically different surge is "streaming in" an extra 5000 soldiers a month for the next six months to search, destroy and this time for sure, secure. What foolishness. We could put all 130,000 soldiers in Iraq into the center of Baghdad and there's still 6 million Iraqis living there. The odds are really just not with success on this one. Not to mention that the "insurgents," whoever they really might be, are simply leaving the city and spreading their violence around the countryside. So how are we going to ever secure the other 167,000 square miles of Iraq? And much more is it going to cost us in blood and treasure to find out we simply can't?

Holy Joe then throws down the latest Brer Rabbit GOP talking point.

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.

Among the specific ideas under consideration are to tangle up the deployment of requested reinforcements by imposing certain "readiness" standards, and to redraft the congressional authorization for the war, apparently in such a way that Congress will assume the role of commander in chief and dictate when, where and against whom U.S. troops can fight.

It's painfully apparent to anyone who doesn't want the Democratic Party to commit political suicide that cutting off the funding is not an option. Democrats aren't that cruel that they would leave the troops that are already stuck in the sand pit without funds. So they propose instead to demand conditions on the money.

Oh the horror. They don't want any kid to be sent into a war zone without proper training and equipment and considering how inept our leadership on this dunderheaded occupation has been, it's about damn time that somebody else took it over. This is exactly why our forefathers established the system of checks and balances. When your president acts like a kid playing with toy soldiers, it's time for the grownups to step in and set some limits, just as one would for any out of control ten year old.

Lieberman ends with the classic neo-con mantra. Just give it six more months and you'll see -- this time for sure it will work. And you if you don't support it, you just want us to lose. But the most deluded graf in the whole piece is probably this one.

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.

Halting the operation at midpoint? I guess by the time anything happens, it will be the midpoint but who the hell asked Bush to start the operation when he knew damn well nobody wanted him to send a paltry 20,000 more soldiers into a slaughterhouse? Bush put the troops in that danger. The Democrats didn't. And you have to love this idea that there's all these horrible people just waiting on the border for us to leave so they can rush in. I mean, haven't we in fact, been fighting terrorists, insurgents, militias for the last four years?

Not to mention the administration has been working overtime for the last six months to convince us Iran is already there. The only thing our withdrawal would do is give "them" one less target which couldn't help but diminish the volume of violence. And we wouldn't be killing anybody and contributing to anti-Americanism with innocent collateral damage. That sounds more like victory to me than the idea of openly taking sides in a civil war.

This surge only serves one man and one purpose. It allows George W Bush to once again avoid the embarrassment of admitting he made a mistake and presiding over the inevitable withdrawal of our troops. He would prefer to drag out the occupation long enough to leave that unpleasant task to the next president. All the easier to shift the blame for the failed policy and to continue to bleed the treasury for his crony contractors. Shame on Lieberman for helping him do it.

The piece identifies Holy Joe as "an Independent senator from Connecticut." If I was Connecticut, I'd be embarrassed to claim him.

Meanwhile, Michael van der Galien has a more conservative take. He had me going when he was buying into the Iraq as a central front on terror but taken in context, I thought he made some good points. However, the reaction in the comment section at TMV was mixed.