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During last night's debate, Joe Lieberman was asked about claims he made in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in November 2005, of "visible and practical" progress in Iraq. He said:
Uh, I'm going to be very brief. What I wrote in the Wall Street Journal article, I, is what I, I saw. In November and December of last year I saw progress. Two elections had been held, a third was about to happen. The economy in Iraq was beginning to, um, come alive again. And we had decided to start to embed American troops and Iraqi military and that was working very well. Uh, unfortunately, beginning in February when the terrorists, al Qaeda in Iraq, when the terrorists, al Qaeda in Iraq blew up a holy Shi'ia mosque in Samarra Iraq and inflamed sectarian violence, obviously since then, particularly in Baghdad and the Sunni triangle, things have gone heartbreakingly bad.
So, things only went bad after the February 22nd bombing of the Golden Mosque? Hardly...
Lieberman penned his Wall Street Journal screed on November 29, 2005, after spending November 23rd and 24th in Iraq. Let's take a look at what was happening in Iraq while Lieberman spent his two days cowering in the Green Zone, and at the three months that followed before the February 22nd bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra.
Said Lieberman of what he saw during those two days:
More work needs to be done, of course, but the Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood
Hussein's attorneys had suspended participation in the process earlier this month, fearing for their safety. Most of the defense team fled the country after two colleagues were shot to death and another was wounded following the first trial session on Oct. 19. [...]
In Baghdad, gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms killed Khadim Sarhid Hemaiyem, a Sunni tribal leader, his three sons and his son-in-law at their home Wednesday, according to the Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni organization.
And on that day, Staff Sergeant Aram Bass, Sergeant William Meeuwsen and Specialist Allen Knop, died. And on November 24th?
A suicide attacker steered a car packed with explosives toward U.S. soldiers giving away toys to children outside a hospital in central Iraq on Thursday, killing at least 31 people. Almost all of the victims were women and children, police said.
In all, 53 people were killed in bombings and gunfire across the country
And on that day, Specialist Javier Villanueva, Staff Sergeant Steven Reynolds, Private 1st Class Marc Delgado, Sergeant 1st Class Eric Pearrow and Private 1st Class Ryan Christensen, died.
Apparently Lieberman missed all that while preparing to write:
There are many more cars on the streets, satellite television dishes on the roofs, and literally millions more cell phones in Iraqi hands than before. All of that says the Iraqi economy is growing.
It's too bad that those cars are often packed with explosives and the cell phones used to set off IEDs. At any rate, Lieberman left that flowering democracy of "visible and practical progress," no doubt in much the same way, if not the same flight, described in the Washington Post on November 25th, flying:
...from the Green Zone, the Black Hawk gunners wore night vision scopes, which look like little binoculars on eyeglasses, so they could spot suspicious activity through the night. The pilot of the C-17 military transport that flew us out of Iraq did not turn on the interior lights until we had reached a safe altitude -- and were well out of Baghdad airspace.
And after Lieberman was safely home and in the three months before the bombing of the Golden Mosque? Let's look at random dates between November 24, 2005 and February 22, 2006, to see what Iraq was like before things went "heartbreakingly bad."
A young man in a black headdress rammed the pickup into a tanker truck at the station just as he exploded a suicide bomb, creating a fireball that killed three [...]
...the other killed four people when explosives in a parked car detonated as two armored cars passed in downtown Baghdad. [...]
In southern Iraq, police said they found the body of a Sunni Muslim cleric who...the second Sunni religious figure killed in Basra in the past seven days, increasing fears of sectarian warfare between Sunnis and Shiites.
Two prominent Sunni Arab politicians were shot dead in Baghdad on Monday, and diplomatic officials confirmed that four Western aid workers had been abducted by gunmen one day earlier.
A suicide bomber blew himself up at a Baghdad police academy on Tuesday, sending terrified survivors rushing for the shelter of concrete blast walls where a second bomber detonated explosives strapped to his body, witnesses said.
The double suicide attack -- the latest, minor tactical variation in the daily bombings that over nearly three years of war have reduced much of Baghdad's public areas to bleak gray blast walls and rubble -- killed at least 27 people
Iraqi soldiers patrolling a highway linking Baghdad with Jordan found the bodies of 11 men by the side of the road, handcuffed and shot in the head [...]
Iraqi police found the bodies of another nine men by the side of a road between the predominantly Sunni cities of Fallujah and Ramadi
An Iraqi government search of a detention center in Baghdad operated by Interior Ministry special commandos found 13 prisoners who had suffered abuse serious enough to require medical treatment, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Sunday night.
An Iraqi official with firsthand knowledge of the search said that at least 12 of the 13 prisoners had been subjected to "severe torture," including sessions of electric shock and episodes that left them with broken bones.
Under a mounting insurgent offensive against Iraq's gasoline supply, the country's largest fuel refinery sat idle Thursday. [...]
On Thursday, authorities confirmed that the refinery had been closed since Dec. 21 by a concerted insurgent campaign against gasoline distributors and filling stations. [...]
In Baghdad, Brig. Gen. William H. McCoy Jr. of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers told news agencies that attacks on Iraqi contractors working on reconstruction reached a record in December.
The governor of Basra said Friday that he would stop cooperating with British forces on security and other issues in the southern province unless they released five Iraqi policemen currently in British custody.
The standoff comes at a time of mounting unrest in what was once one of Iraq's most tranquil regions. [...]
A steadily deteriorating relationship between British troops and a police force dominated by Shiite Muslim militia groups has led to an increase in violence in recent months
As Iraqi politicians debated the formation of a government on Wednesday, a wave of gun and bomb attacks killed at least 16 people in the capital, including five children. [...]
Six police officers and a civilian were killed in separate attacks in Baghdad, and in what has become an almost daily event, police found the bodies of four Iraqis who had been handcuffed and shot in the head.
Such was the three months of progress that Joe Lieberman spoke of last night in defense of his Wall Street Journal op-ed that was simply cheerleading for the Bush administration's already failed Iraq policy, never mind what the facts on the ground were. And bear in mind that these are merely snapshots of the three months in question. Had every act of violence in Iraq, every death since Lieberman wrote his opinion piece been included, you would be reading until after November 7th.
Lieberman was lying then and he was lying last night. And he dared to call Ned Lamont a liar for telling the truth.
And by the way, during those three months before the bombing of the Golden Mosque caused things to go, according to Joe Lieberman, "heartbreakingly bad," one hundred and eighty-four U.S. servicemen and women died. But Joe Lieberman only saw progress.
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