This Washington Post article by Lieberman (linked here and quoted below) contains the sort of rhetoric I most distrust: it sounds persuasive, but is riddled with logical fallacies.
"One choice---stand, fight, and win." I loathe catchphrases partly because they provoke visceral responses without filling in the blanks. Of COURSE we all like to "win." Furthermore, I don't know a single soul from either party who thinks we should, say, surrender to Al-Quaeda, or give up doing everything in our power to protect our people. But among the ways of addressing with this pressing problem, "going to war in Iraq" was never at the top of the list of rational solutions.
"Stand, fight, and win"? Okay, "fight" I understand, but what about the notion of "standing"? To fight Al-Quaeda, we don't necessarily have to be in Iraq; as the Bush Administration itself is wont to say, Al-Quaeda is a worldwide problem. When Lieberman talks about standing, he means against Al-Quaeda and implies that the only way or place to do it is in Iraq. Why?
And if we "win," what exactly do we win? What is it we are fighting for? If it's the elimination of the baddies, the Iraq connection is a connection we created ourselves by opening up a power vacuum. If we stand, fight, and win in Iraq against AQ, the organization won't disappear, even though some of the individual operatives do. So won't they just carry the fight elsewhere?
As for fighting to secure the "freedom" of the "Iraqui people" (a diverse group with extremely divergent goals all of whom interpret "freedom" differently), this is not something I think you can do for other people. We owe them something, having incurred a debt, but it can't be paid off with freedom or democracy. Those are things people have to want. You can't pay the price of freedom for someone else, not really. If they ask you to help, you can help---but only up to a point.
Or is this what we "win"? "We fight them there so we don't have to fight them here," people tell me. But that's bad logic as well, unless the plan is to go on fighting them in perpetuity. Furthermore, fighting people tends to make not only them but also their friends and relatives very, very angry. And tearing up a country's infrastructure and killing civilians----even when it's in a good cause---makes them angry as well. So if we fight in Iraq to stop them from bringing the war over here, we certainly need to make up our minds to stay there forever because if we ever stop----or if we ever win or "win"----we will, according to that reasoning, have to fight them here. Which would by definition mean we hadn't won at all.
I am so sick of the elisions and evasions and glib slogans. Reid was wrong to say we've "lost" in Iraq because there was never in fact anything to win; and Leiberman is wrong to tell us that we have only one choice because one choice means no choices, and that's clearly not the case. We can make other choices. Whether we should or not is the question.
I didn't want the damned war in the first place, but since we started it, I do feel a certain sense of responsibility to the Iraqui people. At this juncture, I am not convinced that the best way we can serve them is doing more of what we're doing instead of, you know, SOMETHING ELSE. I am not even sure anymore how to measure "progress" of the sort Lieberman refers to because I don't understand what it is we're supposed to be accomplishing. Even assuming progress, I doubt it will be an unbroken line (<understatement of the year). In any case, I'm not likely to listen to or take seriously any member of the party that cynically manipulated the country into this war for a variety of hazy/endlessly reframed objectives that don't bear thinking about. And I'm not likely to listen, either, to that party's enablers. Fool me once, etc.
CONTRA. Since writing this, I found this excellent posting in the blog Maverick Views which perhaps reflects the view of those who see Lieberman's point. I like it because I think it nails down what I'd call a centrist view of the Iraq situation (one I don't think I share any longer).
An excerpt from Lieberman's statement---reasonable seeming but wrong----is quoted below:
[Lieberman, Washington Posts, One Choice in Iraq]
In the two months since Petraeus took command, the United States and its Iraqi allies have made encouraging progress on two problems that once seemed intractable: tamping down the Shiite-led sectarian violence that paralyzed Baghdad until recently and consolidating support from Iraqi Sunnis -- particularly in Anbar, a province dismissed just a few months ago as hopelessly mired in insurgency.
This progress is real, but it is still preliminary....
Indeed, to the extent that last week's bloodshed clarified anything, it is that the battle of Baghdad is increasingly a battle against al-Qaeda. Whether we like it or not, al-Qaeda views the Iraqi capital as a central front of its war against us.
Al-Qaeda's strategy for victory in Iraq is clear. It is trying to kill as many innocent people as possible in the hope of reigniting Shiite sectarian violence and terrorizing the Sunnis into submission.
In other words, just as Petraeus and his troops are working to empower and unite Iraqi moderates by establishing basic security, al-Qaeda is trying to divide and conquer with spectacular acts of butchery.
That is why the suggestion that we can fight al-Qaeda but stay out of Iraq's "civil war" is specious, since the very crux of al-Qaeda's strategy in Iraq has been to try to provoke civil war.
The current wave of suicide bombings in Iraq is also aimed at us here in the United States -- to obscure the recent gains we have made and to convince the American public that our efforts in Iraq are futile and that we should retreat....
Even as the American political center falters, the Iraqi political center is holding. In the aftermath of last week's attacks, there were no large-scale reprisals by Shiite militias -- as undoubtedly would have occurred last year. Despite the violence, Iraq's leadership continues to make slow but visible progress toward compromise and reconciliation....
Certainly al-Qaeda can be weakened by isolating it politically. But even after the overwhelming majority of Iraqis agree on a shared political vision, there will remain a hardened core of extremists who are dedicated to destroying that vision through horrific violence. These forces cannot be negotiated or reasoned out of existence. They must be defeated.
The challenge before us, then, is whether we respond to al-Qaeda's barbarism by running away, as it hopes we do -- abandoning the future of Iraq, the Middle East and ultimately our own security to the very people responsible for last week's atrocities -- or whether we stand and fight.
To me, there is only one choice that protects America's security -- and that is to stand, and fight, and win.
[quote ends]
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