No more war based on lies

6/17/07
First off, no one should be surprised at this latest blast of lunacy. Followers of the neoconservative doctrine, of which Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman is among the most famous, have been itching to go after Iran for years. So though CBS host Bob Schieffer was taken aback by Lieberman’s push last Sunday to go after that country for supposedly endangering our troops in Iraq, he really should not have been.
It was never a secret that Baghdad was just the beginning. And had the current war gone well, the push to move on into Tehran and Damascus and points beyond would have commenced apace. But, of course, Iraq has been an unceasing disaster, so supporters of constant warfare have been forced to hold off. Whatever their actual reasons are for this grand empire in the sand, no one seems to know.
Among constituents who think Lieberman’s stance is sheer madness, there’s an awkward balance. No one wants to be seen as defending a country run by a tyrannical, fundamentalist regime. Iran’s religious leadership espouses a worldview that is antithetical to everything our country is supposed to stand for. It has long been recognized as a supporter of international terrorism, and many observers thought our country could have been justified had we decided to take on that nation, instead of Iraq, all those years ago.
But that’s not how it went. Five years ago, we were at the peak of our international stature. Had we then laid out a coherent rationale for taking on a violent, regressive Tehran regime, we might have been followed by much of the world. Instead, we decided to lie our way into the neighboring country. Saddam Hussein made a more convenient villain.
So what is one to make of Lieberman’s claims, repeated on Friday, that Iran is training forces just over the border to go into Iraq and harm our soldiers?
"We’ve told them," said Lieberman, "we’ve said so publicly that the Iranians have a base in Iran at which they are training Iraqis who are coming in and killing Americans. … We can’t just talk to them. If they don’t play by the rules, we’ve got to use our force and, to me, that would include taking military action to stop them from doing what they’re doing now."
Here’s the problem. In the wake of WMDs, never-ending reports of progress, the insurgency’s "last throes" and politicized terror alerts, our leaders have lost the country. We don’t believe you.
It’s a dangerous scenario. Having been wrong so often and having so completely politicized national security policy, our leaders have no credibility to tell us who is and is not a threat. We’ve been lied to before, and our troops are paying the price. After everything we’ve seen, does Joe Lieberman honestly expect the country and his home state to fall in line behind him?
"We cannot let them get away with it," he says. "If we do, they’ll take that as a sign of weakness on our part."
Enough of this. We don’t make policy based on how other countries will "take" it. We don’t want never-ending war, and our Army couldn’t handle it if we did. Surely Lieberman knows the Iranians wouldn’t react meekly to military action on our part. We can’t just strike once from the air and be done with it.
Lieberman and his ilk cannot be allowed to lie us into another war. This madness must be stopped.