[Rhodes22-list] stirring the hornet's nest.... (political)

[brad haslett]

Slim,

I'd love to debate you point for point but I'm facing
more pressing issues today.  Like this one - a
minority contractor who used his government sanctioned
"oppressed" status to get a Katrina clean-up contract
owes me $4500 and thinks he can get away without
paying.  I'll be spending much of today on the phone
with our Gulfport attorney.  Hopefully, memory serves
me correctly and contract law prevails over ethnicity.
 We'll see.  Anyway, Senator Lieberman made a
brilliant speech on the floor of the Senate yesterday
that addresses some of your concerns.  I've included
it here for your reading pleasure.

Brad

------------

November 15, 2005
Floor Statement of Senator Joe Lieberman on Iraq
Amendments to the FY06 Defense Authorization Bill

Mr. President, this is one of those quiet moments in
the Senate with very few people in the Chamber when,
in my opinion, something very important is happening.
It is happening in good measure because of the two
good men, my colleagues from Virginia and Michigan,
who lead the Armed Services Committee, of which I am
privileged to be a member. They are two gentlemen, two
patriots, two people who have known each other for a
long time, who work closely together, respect each
other, even seem to like each other and, most
important of all, trust each other.

Those qualities of personal trust and personal
relationship have been too absent from our nation's
consideration of the ongoing war in Iraq among our
political leadership. We have, I am convinced,
suffered from it.

It is no surprise to my colleagues that I strongly
supported the war in Iraq. I was privileged to be the
Democratic cosponsor, with the Senator from Virginia,
of the authorizing resolution which received
overwhelming bipartisan support. As I look back on it
and as I follow the debates about prewar intelligence,
I have no regrets about having sponsored and supported
that resolution because of all the other reasons we
had in our national security interest to remove Saddam
Hussein from power – a brutal, murdering dictator, an
aggressive invader of his neighbors, a supporter of
terrorism, a hater of the United States of America. He
was, for us, a ticking time bomb that, if we did not
remove him, I am convinced would have blown up,
metaphorically speaking, in America's face.

I am grateful to the American military for the
extraordinary bravery and brilliance of their campaign
to remove Saddam Hussein. I know we are safer as a
nation, and to say the obvious that the Iraqi people
are freer as a people, and the Middle East has a
chance for a new day and stability with Saddam Hussein
gone.

We will come to another day to debate the past of
prewar intelligence. But let me say briefly the
questions raised in our time are important. The
international intelligence community believed Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Probably most
significant, and I guess historically puzzling, is
that Saddam Hussein acted in a way to send a message
that he had a program of weapons of mass destruction.
He would not, in response to one of the 17 U.N.
Security Council resolutions that he violated, declare
he had eliminated the inventory of weapons of mass
destruction that he reported to the U.N. after the end
of the gulf war in 1991.

I do not want to go off on that issue. I want to say
that the debate about the war has become much too
partisan in our time. And something is happening here
tonight that I believe, I hope, I pray we will look
back and say was a turning point and opened the road
to Republican and Democratic cooperation, White House
and congressional cooperation, to complete the
mission. As Senator Levin said, no matter what anyone
thinks about why we got into the war and whether we
should have been in there, it is hard to find anybody
around the Senate – I have not heard anybody – who
does not want us to successfully complete our mission
there. I feel that deeply.

If we withdraw prematurely from Iraq, there will be
civil war, and there is a great probability that
others in the neighborhood will come in. The Iranians
will be tempted to come in on the side of the Shia
Muslims in the south. The Turks will be tempted to
come in against the Kurds in the north. The other
Sunni nations, such as the Saudis and the Jordanians,
will be sorely tempted, if not to come in at least to
aggressively support the Sunni Muslim population.
There will be instability in the Middle East, and the
hope of creating a different model for a better life
in the Middle East in this historic center of the Arab
world, Iraq, will be gone.

If we successfully complete our mission, we will have
left a country that is self-governing with an open
economy, with an opportunity for the people of Iraq to
do what they clearly want to do, which is to live a
better life, to get a job, to have their kids get a
decent education, to live a better life. There seems
to be broad consensus on that, and yet the
partisanship that characterizes our time here gets in
the way of realizing those broadly expressed and
shared goals.

“Politics must end at the water's edge.” That is what
Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan said,
articulating the important ideal that we seem to have
lost too often in our time. I found a fuller statement
of Senator Vandenberg’s position, the ideal. I found
it to be in some ways more complicated and in other
ways much more compelling. I want to read from it.
Senator Vandenberg said:

“To me ‘bipartisan foreign policy’ means a mutual
effort, under our indispensable two-party system, to
unite our official voice at the water's edge so that
America speaks with maximum authority against those
who would divide and conquer us and the free world.”

That speaks to us today – the threat of Islamist
terrorism, the desire they have to divide us and, in
that sense, to conquer us in the free world. Senator
Vandenberg continued in his definition of what he
meant by bipartisanship in foreign policy:

“It does not involve the remotest surrender of free
debate in determining our position. On the contrary,
frank cooperation and free debate are indispensable to
ultimate unity of which I speak.”

In a word, it simply seeks national security ahead of
partisan advantage.

I felt again in recent days and recent months how far
we have strayed down the partisan path from
Vandenberg's ideals. The most recent disconcerting
evidence of this was the lead story from the
Washington Post – it was in papers all over the
country – last Saturday, November 12. I read from that
story:

“President Bush and leading congressional Democrats
lobbed angry charges at each other Friday in an
increasingly personal battle over the origins of the
Iraq war. Although the two sides have long skirmished
over the war, the sharp tenor Friday resembled an
election year campaign more than a policy
disagreement.”

That is from Saturday's Washington Post. Campaign
rhetoric over policy debate, and what about? About how
we got into the war 2 1/2 years ago, not about how we
together can successfully complete our mission in
Iraq.

The questions raised about prewar intelligence are not
irrelevant, they are not unimportant, but they are
nowhere near as important and relevant as how we
successfully complete our mission in Iraq and protect
the 150,000 men and women in uniform who are fighting
for us there.

I go back to Vandenberg's phrase; the question is how
Democrats and Republicans can unite our voice “at the
water's edge” against those who would divide and
conquer us and the free world in Iraq, I add, and
beyond.

The danger is that by spending so much attention on
the past here, we contribute to a drop in public
support among the American people for the war, and
that is consequential. Terrorists know they cannot
defeat us in Iraq, but they also know they can defeat
us in America by breaking the will and steadfast
support of the American people for this cause.

There is a wonderful phrase from the Bible that I have
quoted before, “If the sound of the trumpet be
uncertain, who will follow into battle?” In our time,
I am afraid that the trumpet has been replaced by
public opinion polls, and if the public opinion polls
are uncertain, if support for the war seems to be
dropping, who will follow into battle and when will
our brave and brilliant men and women in uniform in
Iraq begin to wonder whether they have the support of
the American people? When will that begin to affect
their morale?

I worry the partisanship of our time has begun to get
in the way of the successful completion of our mission
in Iraq. I urge my colleagues at every moment, when we
do anything regarding this war that we consider the
ideal and we are confident within ourselves. Not that
we are stifling free debate. Free debate, as
Vandenberg said, is the necessary precondition to the
unity we need to maximize our authority against those
who would divide and conquer us. But the point is to
make sure we feel in ourselves that the aim of our
actions and our words is national security, not
partisan advantage.

Now we come to today. After reading that paper on
Saturday, I took the original draft amendment
submitted by Senator Warner and Senator Frist – it
actually wasn't offered, but it was around – and
Senator Levin and Senator Reid. I took the amendments
back to Connecticut, and last night I looked them
over. Neither one expressed fully what I hoped it
would, but as I stepped back, I said that these two
amendments – one Republican, one Democratic,
unfortunate in a way, breaking by parties – are not
that far apart.

I like the way in which the Warner amendment recited
again the findings that led us to war against Saddam
Hussein and, quite explicitly, cited the progress that
has been made. I do think Senator Levin’s amendment
doesn’t quite do this part enough, about the progress,
particularly among the political leaders of Iraq. They
have done something remarkable in a country that lived
for 30 years under a dictator who suppressed all
political activity, encouraged the increasing division
and bitterness among the Shias, the Sunnis, and the
Kurds. These people, with our help and encouragement,
have begun to negotiate like real political leaders in
a democracy. It is not always pretty. What we do here
is not always most attractive. That is democracy. Most
important of all, eight million Iraqis came out in the
face of terrorist threats in January to vote on that
interim legislation. Almost ten million came out to
vote on a constitution, which is a pretty good
document, a historically good document in the context
of the Arab world.

What happened when the Sunnis felt they were not
getting enough of what they wanted in a referendum?
They didn't go to the street, most of them, with arms
to start a civil war. They registered to vote. That is
a miraculous achievement and a change in attitude and
action. They came out to vote in great numbers and
they will come out, I predict, again in December in
the elections and elect enough Sunnis to have an
effect on the Constitution next year. So I wish that
some of that had been stated in Senator Levin's
amendment. 



--- Slim <salm at mn.rr.com> wrote:

> Never mind the spin or the rhetoric, forget about
> so-called intelligence,
> never mind your own left or right stripes.  What
> does your gut really say to
> you about this war?  Here's what mine tells me:
> 
> First the tyranny of Saddam. This is no reason to
> invade a sovereign state.
> The US has ignored or even supported so many tyrants
> I can't count 'em.  But
> just to name a few, Pinochet, The Shaw of Iran, Kim
> Jong Ill, even Saddam
> himself was armed by the US.  So we say, "He's
> abusing his own citizens so
> we better go in there and take him down."  Not only
> is this bad foreign
> policy, but it's bullshit policy because we don't
> really care.  We didn't
> care about the Shaw's death squads or Pinochet's. 
> Why now Saddam?  The
> whole tyrant argument holds no water at all.
> 
> The same goes for the argument about spreading
> freedom and democracy. What a
> load of crap!  Don't tell me that our government
> actually give a rat's ass
> about an Iraqi democracy.  No, I'm not saying
> democracy itself is crap, but
> why would we care about Iraq when we don't care
> about the dozens of other
> non-democratic countries?  Why Iraq?  Why not invade
> Cuba?  Isn't Fidel a
> tyrant?  Why not North Korea?  We know Kim Jong Ill
> is a tyrant.  This is
> bad foreign policy.
> 
> I agreed with Mike Abdullah when he stated we had no
> business in Kuwait in
> the first place.  We shouldn't be fighting other
> countries' border battles.
> As Mike said, What was Saddam going to do with his
> oil?  Drink it?  He was
> selling it on the open market and black market just
> like every other Arab
> state.  That was bad foreign policy.
> 
> But whatever, then we had Saddam completely
> contained with the no-fly-zone
> and the sanctions.  He was no threat to us.  Perhaps
> he was a "threat" to
> Israel, but why go to war with someone you've
> already beaten?  This is bad
> foreign policy.
> 
> Did we need to go in and hunt for WMD?  Do we need
> to go into ANY country
> hunting for WMD?  Again, why not North Korea?  This
> is bad foreign policy.
> 
> Did we need to go into Iraq to control the oil?  No.
>  What have oil prices
> done since then?  The exact same thing they would
> have done had we not gone
> to war.  They've gone up.  Happy now?
> 
> Did we need to go into Iraq as a response to 9/11? 
> This is asinine foreign
> policy.  Everyone knows Saddam had nothing to do
> with that.
> 
> Thousands are now dead or wounded so Halliburton
> could make a windfall.
> Folks, the definition of Fascism is when government
> is in bed with business.
> THIS IS VERY BAD FOREIGN POLICY!
> 
> Our government is despised by nearly every soul
> outside our borders.  And
> over half those inside!  Do polls dictate our
> policy?  I think not.
> Although I noticed the Indonesians' attitude towards
> us perked up a bit
> after all the tsunami relief money that poured in. 
> But even our low-key,
> happy neighbors to the north hate Bush.  The joke
> going around Canada is
> that all you have to do to get elected is to be
> anti-Bush.  I won't go into
> how mein furor is screwing Canada on the softwoods
> issue.  I'll leave that
> for another thread.  But we buy lots and lots of oil
> from Canada so we ought
> to be nice to her.  Guess who else wants Canadian
> oil?  China.  And lots and
> lots of it.  Maybe we should invade Canada.  Yeah,
> that's the ticket, eh!
> 
> It's beyond me how anyone can favor this war for any
> reason.
> 
> Slim
> 
> __________________________________________________
> Use Rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org, Help?
> www.rhodes22.org/list
> 



	
		
__________________________________ 
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 
http://mail.yahoo.com