It took all of two days for Joe Lieberman to jettison the high-minded justifications for his post-primary campaign against Democratic Senate nominee Ned Lamont. While in his concession speech on Tuesday, Lieberman repeatedly blamed the "politics of partisan polarization" for his stunning loss to an unknown challenger, he pivoted on Thursday to touting what is actually the central rationale of his candidacy: that he, and he alone, is strong on defense. Too many people, Lieberman fretted in Waterbury, "don't appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security" posed by jihadist terrorism. It's up to Lieberman to save Connecticut voters from Lamont, whose naïve liberal softness will, according to the three-term senator, "strengthen the terrorists, and they will strike again."
Leave aside Lieberman's unseemly eagerness to paint his opponent as a jihadist cat's-paw. There's a bigger problem with his pitch: Lieberman isn't strong on defense at all.
Sure, Lieberman's a hawk. Since arriving in the Senate in 1989, he rarely met a U.S. military action he didn't like. And on numerous occasions, Lieberman's enthusiasm for war has led to enhanced national security, as with his votes for the 1991 Gulf War and the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. What's more, he also stood up for commendable interventions, like the NATO campaigns in the Balkans during the 1990s, when not many Democrats were willing to lend them unequivocal support.
But belligerence isn't the same thing as wisdom -- and hawkishness does not always lead to a safer America. Lieberman has, of course, been the most vigorous Democratic defender of the Iraq quagmire, which has laid waste to U.S. defense capabilities in a way that not even Vietnam was able to. Many have asked why Lieberman has been the lone Democratic hawk to face a vigorous liberal primary challenge, and the answer is surely complex. But part of it may be that while other Democratic hawks emphasize the risks of withdrawal, Lieberman is unique among Democrats in defending the wisdom of the invasion itself, a position so inexplicable as to be nearly insane. Indeed, Lieberman's judgment on defense questions is like that of a stopped clock: the hawkish position, applied consistently, has to be right sooner or later. What Lieberman is asking Connecticut -- and the Democratic Party, and the country -- to accept is that the only secure America is a bellicose America. And that position is a guarantee of future Iraqs.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Lieberman's defense record is the difficulty of defining Liebermanism. On the central question of why a nation should or shouldn't go to war, Lieberman's answer is simply, "yes!" His Senate-floor explanation of his 1991 vote for the Gulf War wasn't a ringing endorsement of the need to confront Saddam Hussein, or a defense of Kuwaiti sovereignty, or even a simple explanation of how the war served American interests – none of which were difficult cases to make. Rather, Lieberman contended that the war was necessary "because our president has asked us to vote to support him in this hour of challenge." (Perhaps such a vigorous deference to someone else's judgment explains Lieberman's belief that criticism of George W. Bush comes "at our nation's peril.")
But the Gulf War presented a rather straightforward case; favoring it doesn't necessarily say much about a politician's perspective on defense. More enlightening is Lieberman's position on Bosnia, which was nothing short of confused. In 1994, Lieberman endorsed a proposal by Kansas Republican Bob Dole, the Senate majority leader, to lift an arms embargo on the besieged Bosnian Muslims. It was an admirable position, but Lieberman's defense of it was little more than an admonition that "we have seen the triumph of evil."
When asked more specific questions about U.S. intervention in the Balkans, the proud hawk became positively incoherent. During one CNN appearance, Lieberman simultaneously ruled out the use of U.S. ground forces -- "Nobody, not me, not anybody else I've heard of is talking about American ground troops going in to fight this war," he told Bob Novak in April 1994 -- and maintained that "one of the lessons here is when you're dealing with murderers, aggressors, thugs, liars like the Serbs, that you better not use limited power if you expect more than a limited response." The response is many things -- emotional, passionate, and, on the merits, largely correct -- but it's hardly a clear-headed assessment of strategic considerations.
Fervor, clouded thinking, and an instinctual hawkishness are about all that Liebermanism amounts to. (It certainly isn't the case that Lieberman, like Tony Blair, is centrally concerned with the marriage of Western military power to humanitarian concerns, given that the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the humanitarian crisis in Liberia in 2003 were two prospective interventions that left him cold.) Not once during Lieberman's two national campaigns did he ever articulate anything close to a Lieberman Doctrine. To be fair, it's the rare senator who spells out his own foreign-policy vision. But Lieberman is one of an extremely few senators -- and unique in the Democratic Party -- to construct his public persona around questions of war and peace.
The incoherence of Liebermanism is revealed most clearly in the senator's adoption of nearly every argument available for the Iraq War. Lieberman is hardly alone in having bought dubious claims about Saddam Hussein's non-existent WMD. But he has mounted vastly more reality-averse defenses of the war -- especially as it relates to the war on terrorism. In 2003, for instance, Lieberman equated Saddam Hussein's regime with that of the Taliban as being "critical to our global counter-terrorism campaign," since both regimes "were incubators of hateful violence." Never mind that one was in league with the terrorists who attacked the United States on 9/11 and the other wasn't. No one who could make this conflation should ever lecture anyone else on his defense credentials, but Lieberman actually appears to believe such inanities. That would explain his inability to consider the prospect -- even if only to dismiss it -- that extrication from Iraq might free U.S. defense resources to refocus on al-Qaeda, a case made by Lieberman's Senate colleague Russ Feingold, who articulates the most compelling rationale for withdrawal. (Judging by a recent appearance on "Hardball," Feingold will have a new Senate ally for his argument in Lamont.)
The sad truth, however, is that Lieberman's equation of blanket hawkishness with credibility on security is likely only to harden if he's defeated. For starters, Lieberman himself will doubtlessly peddle the myth that a Democratic flight from bellicosity is a flight from sanity, as he already did in Waterbury. Perhaps more importantly, Lieberman will be abetted by an extremely vocal neoconservative contingent, with allies (if uneasy ones) among Democratic moderates and in the Washington press corps. If there's one myth that neocons have cultivated -- and the media have bought into -- since their post-Vietnam origins in the 1970s, it's that the greater danger to U.S. security comes not from disastrous wars but from overzealous opposition to disastrous wars.
There are fewer more devoted adherents to that strain of American foreign-policy thinking than Lieberman himself. Call this perspective what you like -- puerile, misguided, even paranoid -- but don't call it strong on defense.
Spencer Ackerman is an associate editor at The New Republic.
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