No More Liebermans: 21st Century Leadership Needed

These were comments that I made today regarding a WaPo op-ed by Senator Joseph Lieberman, elected in Connecticut last November by Republicans who wished to defeat Ned Lamont.

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WaPo op-ed: The most pressing problem we face in Iraq is not an absence of Iraqi political will or American diplomatic initiative, both of which are increasing and improving; it is a lack of basic security.

Since over 70% of Lieberman’s electoral success in 2006 consisted of Republicans looking to ensure Ned Lamont’s loss, Joseph Lieberman is still in the Senate and not representing the Democrats’ interests OR the American people’s will when it comes to Iraq. Lieberman is a fool if he actually believes that “basic security” in Iraq is the panacea that will lead us to some imagined improvement in our own national security. For those who have forgotten, our own national security is what this war on terror is supposed to be about. I am afraid that, as long as he continues to refer to civil war as “gang murders “, Lieberman is no more than a ghastly dreamer and a sucker that will climb on board the escalation train bound for hell and embroil our sons and dughters in Iraq’s civil war, making them accomplices in taking the lives of hundreds of thousands more innocent Iraq civilians. For the love of God, will someone please tell Lieberman he’s about three years behind when he says “If Iraq descends into full-scale civil war, it will be a tremendous battlefield victory for al-Qaeda and Iran”? If?!?! I mean, hello???? What the hell is it NOW?

*Re: Improvements in "diplomative initiative", in order for there to be any marked "improvement", the Bush administration would actually have to act on the Iraq Study Group's warning that Bushites had best act as diplomats. To this day, they stubbornly refuse to talk to Iraq and Syria. Lieberman's dreaming again.

To turn around the crisis we need to send more American troops

To turn around this crisis, we need to turn our troops around due west and get them the hell out of there.

In Baghdad and Ramadi, I found that it was the American colonels, even more than the generals, who were asking for more troops.

The colonels don’t want their men and women to die while acting out their small part in the big picture. It doesn’t mean they don’t hope the generals will not act like responsible GENERALS and speak the truth about the stupidity of escalating the bloody violence in this immorally-begun disaster in Iraq instead of tap-dancing for Bush. The war was wrong from the get-go and no temporary surge from a broken army will ever stop the people of Iraq from finishing this civil war, which has been happening before “our lyin’ eyes’ for three years now.

Lieberman can’t face the truth and he doesn’t have the balls to come out and say that there are some victories that can only be won only by admitting that your nation must “lose” certain battles in the greater war for peace and global survival. While we've fiddled in Iraq, we've been losing the greater war. The world's grown poorer in both a physical and spiritual sense. Destabilization and extemism rules the day. If we think we're "safer" in America for what we've done in Iraq, we're out of our bloomin' minds.

I strongly suggest that Lieberman read Gregory Copley’s book “The Art of Victory.” In this ever-changing world, our global survival depends not only upon our own American society’s survival, but upon our ability to cooperate with all other nations and admit we all see through the glass darkly. This is no time for beating our chests and saying that war is equal to greatness or patriotism. We must look at the bigger picture, which is our society's place in the future of this world as it will look in 70 years. We can look back and recall the blood we shed in the Middle East or we can look back and thank God we turned it around. All it ever would have taken is a great leader to step forward and say, "This is the way we're going to do it." Where is that great leadership?

20th century minds like Lieberman’s are going to sow the seed of assured Western death. We desperately need 21st century thinking or before long, we will only be resigned to the annals of history, signs of our once-brilliant ideas about democracy and leadership buried in the sands alongside those of ancient Egypt and all other societies that have suffered the same fate.

While President Gerald Ford is screaming from the grave that we were wrong….while there are increasing vigils and anti-war protests out in the US heartland, Lieberman is showing us that he’s willing to have our fighting men and women kill in the name of Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, increasing the likelihood that we’ll be responsible for radically destabilizing Iraq, the Middle East… the whole oil-producing Gulf if we take Lieberman’s route.

Lieberman’s just one of the Republitards now. [Note - Republitards are the few who still believe the Iraq War was the right thing to do]. All of the dark obstacles in our way have been removed by Lieberman’s stunningly bold-in-the-face-of-truth attempt to re-connect the war in Iraq with 9/11. As Johnny Nash sang, “I can see clearly..”

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NOTE: This is an important piece to read. Glenn Greenwald is calling this Joe Lieberman's declaration of war on Iran

...the tactic of those who want to conflate Israel's enemies with American enemies -- and thereby draw the U.S. into fighting those who are hostile to Israel -- is to ignore any such distinctions and to pretend that supporting anti-Israeli groups is evidence of support for the people who flew those planes into American buildings on 9/11.