Senator Joe Lieberman handed the the “white feather democrats” their surrender rhetoric right back to them on the Senate floor today…
Senator Kit Bond chimed in:
From FOX News Special Report
Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) said Democrats will own a newly revitalized Al Qaeda.
And… Democrats will own a new 9-11 style attack by a newly revitalized Al Qaeda!
** Is it really any surprise then that jihadist websites are quoting Harry Reid word for word?
Here is Senator Joe Lieberman’s speech to the white feather democrats today in the Senate as posted at The Tank, via Michelle Malkin:
“Mr. President, the supplemental appropriations bill we are debating today contains language that would have Congress take control of the direction of our military strategy in Iraq.
Earlier this week the Senate Majority Leader spoke at the Woodrow Wilson Center and laid out the case for why he believes we must do this—why the bill now before this chamber, in his view, offers a viable alternative strategy for Iraq.
In his speech Monday, the Majority Leader described the several steps that this new strategy for Iraq would entail. Its first step, he said, is to “transition the U.S. mission away from policing a civil war—to training and equipping Iraqi security forces, protecting U.S. forces, and conducting targeted counter-terror operations.”
I ask my colleagues to take a step back for a moment and consider this plan.
When we say that U.S. troops shouldn’t be “policing a civil war,” that their operations should be restricted to this narrow list of missions, what does this actually mean?
To begin with, it means that our troops will not be allowed to protect the Iraqi people from the insurgents and militias who are trying to terrorize and kill them. Instead of restoring basic security, which General Petraeus has argued should be the central focus of any counterinsurgency campaign, it means our soldiers would instead be ordered, by force of this proposed law, not to stop the sectarian violence happening all around them—no matter how vicious or horrific it becomes.
In short, it means telling our troops to deliberately and consciously turn their backs on ethnic cleansing, to turn their backs on the slaughter of innocent civilians—men, women, and children singled out and killed on the basis of their religion alone. It means turning our backs on the policies that led us to intervene in the civil war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the principles that today lead many of us to call for intervention in Darfur.
This makes no moral sense at all.
…Al Qaeda’s own leaders have repeatedly said that one of the ways they intend to achieve victory in Iraq is to provoke civil war. They are trying to kill as many people as possible today, precisely in the hope of igniting sectarian violence, because they know that this is their best way to collapse Iraq’s political center, overthrow Iraq’s elected government, radicalize its population, and create a failed state in the heart of the Middle East that they can use as a base.
That is why Al Qaeda blew up the Golden Mosque in Samarra last year. And that is why we are seeing mass casualty suicide bombings by Al Qaeda in Baghdad now.
The sectarian violence that the Majority Leader says he wants to order American troops to stop policing, in other words, is the very same sectarian violence that Al Qaeda hopes to ride to victory. The suggestion that we can draw a bright legislative line between stopping terrorists in Iraq and stopping civil war in Iraq flies in the face of this reality.
I do not know how to say it more plainly: it is Al Qaeda that is trying to cause a full-fledged civil war in Iraq.
…In sum, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t withdraw combat troops from Iraq and still fight Al Qaeda there. If you believe there is no hope of winning in Iraq, or that the costs of victory there are not worth it, then you should be for complete withdrawal as soon as possible.
There is another irony here as well.
…As far as I can tell, none of the supporters of withdrawal have attempted to explain why October 1 is the magic date—what strategic or military significance this holds.
Why not September 1? Or January 1? This is a date as arbitrary as it is inflexible… a deadline for defeat.
Jules Crittenden has more on the democrat’s legislation for surrender, failure and genocide in Iraq, etc.,
A Jacksonian explains Senator Reid’s mischaracterization and insult of Gen. Petraeus’ views.
Update: Even CNN Iraqi correspondents know that troop withdrawal would mean giving Iraq to Iran and Al Qaeda.
Democracy Project explains how you know when you’ve lost.
Update 2: Joe Lieberman has more in the Washington Post– “One Choice in Iraq”:
Last week a series of coordinated suicide bombings killed more than 170 people. The victims were not soldiers or government officials but civilians — innocent men, women and children indiscriminately murdered on their way home from work and school.
If such an atrocity had been perpetrated in the United States, Europe or Israel, our response would surely have been anger at the fanatics responsible and resolve not to surrender to their barbarism.
Unfortunately, because this slaughter took place in Baghdad, the carnage was seized upon as the latest talking point by advocates of withdrawal here in Washington. Rather than condemning the attacks and the terrorists who committed them, critics trumpeted them as proof that Gen. David Petraeus’s security strategy has failed and that the war is “lost.”
And today, perversely, the Senate is likely to vote on a binding timeline of withdrawal from Iraq.
It looks like Joe nailed that one!
At least there is one democrat who supports democracy in Iraq.
How sad that the democratic party has been reduced to a bunch of defeatists unwilling to sacrifice for their nation and who consistently use troops as political pawns.
