Joe Lieberman Denounces Joe Lieberman

Glenn Greenwald has a smooth-as-silk takedown of Joe Lieberman's latest mewlings about Iraq in the Wall Street Journal. It's smooth becomes it only requires one piece of evidence: Lieberman's end-of-2005 Iraq op-ed, when he proclaimed U.S. troops victorious and critics outrageous for suggesting otherwise.

[W]hereas Lieberman is claiming now that everything is different today because we had no real strategy before for ensuring security, it was Lieberman himself who promised Americans in 2005 that we did have exactly such a strategy and that it was working so well that "we can have a much smaller American military presence there by the end of 2006 or in 2007."

Just compare these two statements:

Joe Lieberman, today: "previously there weren't enough soldiers to hold key neighborhoods after they had been cleared of extremists and militias."

Joe Lieberman, 2005: "The administration's recent use of the banner 'clear, hold, and build' accurately describes the strategy as I saw it being implemented last week."

A month or so ago, the political blogs were furiously debating who had bragging rights about the war; whether anti-war thinkers could gloat, or whether they were just lucky predicting the outcome of one foreign adventure. The debate devolved too quickly into whether bloggers had bragging rights, which isn't very interesting. More interesting: The cascading, unending wrongness of the politicians and White House officials who supported and support the long war. Lieberman et al haven't been wrong once, they've misread every single development of the war, and then punted (or just lied) when anti-warriors were suggesting a course change. This is why they're untrustworthy, and why there's so much ire directed at them right now.