Lieberman's Problem

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05 Aug 2008 03:52 pm

My new colleague, Ta-Nehisi Coates - welcome! - pulls up this helpful quote in understanding McCain's biggest backer, Joe Lieberman:

"Lieberman's problem is not that he supported the Iraq invasion, nor that he thinks we need to stay in and finish the job," Suzanne Nossel, a young ex-State Department official and a fellow at a think tank called the Security and Peace Initiative, wrote the other day. "He has lots of mainstream Democratic company in both those positions. The crux of Lieberman's problem is his unwillingness to acknowledge the severity of what's happened in Iraq, and to demand accountability for it."

Put like that, Lieberman is a pretty good stand-in for a lot of other pro-war types who are now hailing the decline in US casualties as "victory" in Iraq. Their victory dance would be a little less galling if there was any serious accounting of the strategic blunders, tactical errors and moral crimes of the last five years, and even the slightest acknowledgment of the enormous ongoing costs of occupying that country for the indefinite future. Instead we get cheer-leading like this from Bret Stephens:

Saddam is dead. Had he remained in power, we would likely still believe he had WMD. He would have been sitting on an oil bonanza priced at $140 a barrel.

He would almost certainly have broken free from an already crumbling sanctions regime. The U.S. would be faced with not one, but two, major adversaries in the Persian Gulf. Iraqis would be living under a regime that, in an average year, was at least as murderous as the sectarian violence that followed its collapse. And the U.S. would have seemed powerless to shape events.

Let's take this one by one. Yes, the end of Saddam is wonderful. But we know now that his WMD parade - the core casus belli - was a charade, and that his ties to al Qaeda were at best marginal when not fabricated; and we also know that his murderousness was emphatically not on the scale of the hundreds of thousands of fatalities and millions of refugees and countless victims of torture and ethnic cleansing in the post-invasion chaos for which the United States bears a great deal of responsibility. And we know Saddam would, moreover, have been a counter-weight to Iran, not in alliance with the Tehran mullahs, as a future Shiite government is likely to be. And the US is, pace Stephens, to a great extent, still powerless to shape the future of a country still riven by sectarian conflict and suspicion, still unable to stand on its own feet, and still opaque to outsiders. And you have to add to the costs of the invasion the profound moral costs of the torture regime, exposed so indelibly at Abu Ghraib, the shift of resources away from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the costs to the European alliance of the invasion, and to US credibility in intelligence, and up to $3 trillion in treasure.

Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy your war? Especially when you realize that the entire endeavor, if McCain wins this election, will almost certainly be a mere platform for the next war. Is all this justified by 9/11? I thought so once. I don't see how you can any more, however relieved we are by a reversible respite in the mayhem.

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