Excerpts from Senator Joseph Lieberman’s statement
on the floor of the United States Senate yesterday, opposing the Democratic Amendment
calling for "dates for the phased redeployment of the United States Forces from Iraq:"
It is no surprise to my colleagues that I strongly
supported the war in Iraq. I was privileged
to be the Democratic cosponsor, with the Senator from Virginia, of the authorizing resolution which received
overwhelming bipartisan support.As I look back on it and as I follow the debates about
prewar intelligence, I have no regrets
about having sponsored and supported that resolution because of all the other
reasons we had in our national security interest to remove Saddam Hussein from
power — a brutal, murdering dictator, an aggressive invader of his neighbors,
a supporter of terrorism, a hater of the United States of America. He was,
for us, a ticking time bomb . . . .I am grateful to the American military for the
extraordinary bravery and brilliance of their campaign to remove Saddam
Hussein. I know we are safer as a
nation, and to say the obvious that the Iraqi people are freer as a people, and
the Middle East has a chance for a new day and stability with Saddam
Hussein gone. . . The international intelligence community believed
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Probably most significant, and I guess
historically puzzling, is that Saddam Hussein acted in a way to send a message
that he had a program of weapons of mass destruction. He
would not, in response to one of the 17 U.N. Security Council resolutions that
he violated, declare he had eliminated the inventory of weapons of mass
destruction that he reported to the U.N. after the end of the gulf war in 1991.
“Politics must end
at the water’s edge.” That is what Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan said, articulating the important ideal that we seem to
have lost too often in our time. . .The questions raised about prewar intelligence are not
irrelevant, they are not unimportant, but they are nowhere near as important
and relevant as how we successfully complete our mission in Iraq and protect the 150,000 men and women in uniform who are
fighting for us there.The danger is that by spending so much attention on the
past here, we contribute to a drop in public support among the American people
for the war, and that is consequential.
.
There is a wonderful phrase from the Bible that I have
quoted before, “If the sound of the
trumpet be uncertain, who will follow into battle?” In our time, I am afraid that the trumpet has
been replaced by public opinion polls, and if the public opinion polls are
uncertain, if support for the war seems to be dropping, who will follow into
battle . . .[The political leaders of Iraq] have done something remarkable in a country that lived
for 30 years under a dictator who suppressed all political activity, encouraged
the increasing division and bitterness among the Shias, the Sunnis, and the
Kurds.These people, with our help and encouragement, have begun
to negotiate like real political leaders in a democracy. It is not always pretty. What we do here is not always most attractive.
That is democracy. Most important of all, eight million Iraqis came out in the face of terrorist threats in
January to vote on that interim legislation. Almost ten million came out to vote on a constitution, which is a
pretty good document, a historically good document in the context of the Arab
world.What happened when the Sunnis felt they were not getting
enough of what they wanted in a referendum? They didn’t go to the street, most of them,
with arms to start a civil war. They registered to vote. That is
a miraculous achievement and a change in attitude and action. They came out to vote in great numbers and they will come out, I predict, again in
December in the elections and elect enough Sunnis to have an effect on the
Constitution next year.
So I wish that some of that had been stated in Senator
Levin’s amendment.
A faint echo of a party that once pledged to bear any
burden, and oppose any foe, to assure the survival of freedom, that welcomed the assignment, and that often
quoted the Bible.