Right On Iran
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted Monday, June 11, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Terrorism: When it comes to understanding the war on terrorism, and the war in Iraq in particular, the smartest guy in Congress may be Joe Lieberman. He made it clear that winning Iraq means confronting Iran.
When his Democratic colleagues were writing off Iraq as a lost cause and scheming how to use a defeat there to embarrass a Republican president, the "independent" senator from Connecticut was staking his political career on the virtue of the cause behind the Iraq War — and the ability of our military forces to complete the job there.
Lieberman — on the left on almost everything except fighting terrorism — lost his party's nomination last year to a well-financed war opponent. But he bucked the party establishment, ran in the general election as an independent, and won another six-year term.
After his re-election, the senator traveled to Iraq, returning to declare that the war is winnable — and must be won.
"I saw firsthand evidence in Iraq of the development of a multiethnic, moderate coalition against the extremists of al-Qaida and against the Mahdi Army, which is sponsored and armed by Iran and has inflamed the sectarian violence," Lieberman wrote in a Washington Post op-ed shortly after returning from the Middle East.
Presciently, Lieberman also declared: "The addition of more troops must be linked to a comprehensive new military, political and economic strategy that provides security for the population so that training of Iraqi troops and the development of a democratic government can move forward."
That's pretty much our new counterinsurgency strategy there. And in Anbar Province, written off as dead a year ago, what Lieberman described as "the development of a multiethnic, moderate coalition against" al-Qaida has led to an extraordinary reduction in violence, a boom in recruitment to the Iraqi security forces, and an alliance between the U.S. military and tribal leaders.
Washington "experts" last fall insisted on negotiating with the fanatics who rule Iran. Senate Armed Services member Lieberman knew then, and repeated on CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday, that we should "strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers."
Failure to take action against Iran could increase domestic dangers, Lieberman is convinced:
"They'll take that as a sign of weakness . . . we will pay for it in Iraq and throughout the region, and ultimately right here at home."
The Jerusalem Post reported over the weekend that senior U.S. military officers "support President George W. Bush's stance to do everything necessary to stop" Iran from becoming a nuclear power, expected in about three years.
Lieberman, top military brass and Bush grasp something that liberal Democrats fixated on catching Osama bin Laden refuse to understand: Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan cannot each be considered in a vacuum. They, plus Syria, the Palestinians, al-Qaida, Hezbollah and Hamas — not to mention relations with Saudi Arabia and global oil supply — are interconnected in post-9/11 geopolitics.
We are at war with a force whose tentacles extend far and wide. But at present its head is located in Tehran, and failure to act against the Islamofascist regime there will ultimately be disastrous — threatening both life and liberty.
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