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April 27, 2007
Leiberman Speaks “Truth to Power”
by Tina Grazier
I found the full transcript of Senator Joe Lieberman’s (ID-CT) speech on the floor of the US Senate over on the Tank blog at NRO. His remarks, posted by Kathryn Jean Lopez, were brilliant and reveal the incredible flaws in the bill as well as the disingenuous arguments of Reid’s position on the war.
By definition, targeted counterterrorism requires our forces to know where, when, and against whom to strike—and that in turn requires accurate, actionable, real-time intelligence. **** This is the kind of intelligence that can only come from ordinary Iraqis, the sea of people among whom the terrorists hide. And that, in turn, requires interacting with the Iraqi people on a close, personal, daily basis. It requires winning individual Iraqis to our side, gaining their trust, convincing them that they can count on us to keep them safe from the terrorists if they share valuable information about them. This is no great secret. This is at the heart of the new strategy that General Petraeus and his troops are carrying out. **** And yet, if we pass this legislation, according to the Majority Leader, U.S. forces will no longer be permitted to patrol Iraq’s neighborhoods or protect Iraqi civilians. They won’t, in his words, be “interjecting themselves between warring factions” or “trying to sort friend from foe.” **** Therefore, I ask the supporters of this legislation:, where, and when our troops can fight is How, exactly, are U.S. forces to gather intelligence about where, when, and against whom to strike, after you have ordered them walled off from the Iraqi population? How, exactly, are U.S. forces to carry out targeted counter-terror operations, after you have ordered them cut off from the very source of intelligence that drives these operations?
There is another irony here as well. **** For most of the past four years, under Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the United States did not try to establish basic security in Iraq. Rather than deploying enough troops necessary to protect the Iraqi people, the focus of our military has been on training and equipping Iraqi forces, protecting our own forces, and conducting targeted sweeps and raids—in other words, the very same missions proposed by the proponents of the legislation before us. **** That strategy failed—and we know why it failed. It failed because we didn’t have enough troops to ensure security, which in turn created an opening for Al Qaeda and its allies to exploit. They stepped into this security vacuum and, through horrific violence, created a climate of fear and insecurity in which political and economic progress became impossible. **** For years, many members of Congress recognized this. We talked about this. We called for more troops, and a new strategy, and—for that matter—a new secretary of defense. **** And yet, now, just as President Bush has come around—just as he has recognized the mistakes his administration has made, and the need to focus on basic security in Iraq, and to install a new secretary of defense and a new commander in Iraq—now his critics in Congress have changed their minds and decided that the old, failed strategy wasn’t so bad after all. **** What is going on here? What has changed so that the strategy that we criticized and rejected in 2006 suddenly makes sense in 2007?
Lacking adequate moral and ethical grounding, a man will reveal his inability to make sound decisions and act with conviction; his ability to notice this flaw in his character is highly unlikely.
Reid and the supporters of this bill are definitely not qualified to lead...they’re not particularly good at writing legislation either. Thankfully the president’s pen will be swift and the shame of leaving our men on the field of battle without funds will stain more than the failed bill.
I salute Senator Leiberman.
Posted by Post Scripts at April 27, 2007 10:22 PM