What Did the Democrats Know and When Did they Know It?

No contemporary US political figure more epitomizes the right-wing, pro-war politics of the Democratic Party than Joe Lieberman. It is no exaggeration to say that the senator from Connecticut is the most important congressional ally of the Bush administration, as he demonstrated again in a column published last week in the Wall Street Journal, a day before Bush’s speech at the US Naval Academy outlining his “strategy for victory” in Iraq.

Even more categorically than the Republican president, the Democratic senator portrayed the US occupation in Iraq as a war between good and evil, declaring that the US military was fighting on the side of 27 million Iraqis against 10,000 terrorists. Why 27 million Iraqis should need 150,000 heavily armed US troops to assist them in such an absurdly one-sided fight, Lieberman did not explain; nor why most of those killed by the US are innocent civilians, i.e., part of the 27 million, not terrorists.

In another assertion that is wildly at odds with the facts, Lieberman claimed that the vast majority of Iraqis and the vast majority of the US forces in Iraq support the US military occupation and are confident of its success. The only danger, he said, was “whether the American people and enough of their representatives in Congress from both parties understand this.”

Lieberman criticized the representatives of both parties in Congress: “I am disappointed by Democrats who are more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq almost three years ago, and by Republicans who are more worried about whether the war will bring them down in next November’s elections, than they are concerned about how we continue the progress in Iraq in the months and years ahead.”

This remarkable declaration deserves a closer look. What are these trifling questions that, according to Lieberman, are distracting his Democratic and Republican colleagues from the greater goal of achieving “progress” in Iraq?

Some Democrats are allegedly too “focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq almost three years ago,” Lieberman says.

This complaint grossly overstates the intensity and seriousness of the Democratic criticism of Bush. The Democrats are so deeply implicated in the decision to go to war that they have raised the issue of the Bush administration’s systematic falsification of the case for war only in the most timid fashion. There have been no suggestions, for instance, that Bush and Cheney should be impeached, let alone prosecuted for war crimes.

Read More
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/dec2005/lieb-d06.shtml