Joe Lieberman's Absurd Op-Ed
Joe Lieberman's huge Wall Street Journal op-ed [Nov. 29] boils down to, "We're making great progress. The Iraqis want us there. America has a strategy for victory."
The key sentence is,
"It is a war between 27 million and 10,000; 27 million Iraqis
who want to live lives of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity
and roughly 10,000 terrorists who are either Saddam
revengists, Iraqi Islamic extremists, or al-Qaeda foreign
fighters, and know their wretched causes will be set back if
Iraq becomes free and modern. "
On the face of it his argument is absurd. How is it possible that 27 million people backed by a super-power's armaments and a flood of taxpayer dollars can't defeat 10,000 terrrorists? It's ridiculous. Obviously the 10,000 [or 100,000 as a high Iraqi government official claimed earlier in the year] have enormous support from the population. How else are they melting away when U.S. soldiers come to "clean them out". As Congressman John Murtha points out "A poll recently conducted shows that over 80% of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of coalition troops, and about 45% of the Iraqi population believe attacks against American troops are justified"
The Iraqi army just needs more training? Bull. It's been two and a half years. Who trained the insurgents? They seemed to have figured out how to fight a guerrilla war on their own. Lieberman claims that over 30,000 Iraq soldiers can "lead the fight" themselves right now. Let's pretend that true. That's triple the number of the insurgents so why can't they deal with them? If things are progressing so well how is it as John Murtha's points out that attacks have increased from 150 a week to 700 a week!
Lieberman says he spent Thanksgiving with marines at Camp Fallujah. Camp Fallujah? Fallujah was a city the size of St. Louis and the U.S. army levelled it. According to Brendan Smith who co-edited "In the Name of Democracy, American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond", the U.S. military bombed it for 8 weeks and destroyed 36,000 homes, 60 schools and 60 mosques. Troops stormed the hospitals, closing them to the city's wounded all for the majestic purpose of preventing "inflated civilian casualty figures coming out of of the hospital." Food and water were cut off to the 30,000 people trapped in the city.
American Journalist Dahr Jamail who has spent eight months in Iraq said that Iraqi NGO's estimate between 4,000 and 6,000 civilians were killed during the siege.
These were war crimes, baby. And Lieberman is visiting and having Thanksgiving Turkey?
Well, what's the surprise? Lieberman co-authored the Iraq aggression with Bush. The Iraq war probably should be called the "Bush/Lieberman War". The Neo-Con from New Haven is in his element.
A week after Joe had turkey in a Fallujah, a city he says was "cleared" of "terrorists", ten U.S. soldiers on patrol were blown to bits. Just a glitch in the pattern of progress, huh Joe? Senator Lieberman certainly deserves his own wing in the International Hall of Shame.