Today [Friday] brings another obnoxious Lieberman op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. As I behold his steady deterioration, I sometimes find myself wondering whether Lieberman is all that smart. I used to think of him as kind of a bright guy, but he's drifted into that minimally informed style of pigheadedness that characterizes a lot of the right wing talk shows he likes to appear on.
This paragraph in particular jumped out at me.
Mr. Obama has said that in proposing this, he is following in the footsteps of Reagan and JFK. But Kennedy never met with Castro, and Reagan never met with Khomeini. And can anyone imagine Presidents Kennedy or Reagan sitting down unconditionally with Ahmadinejad or Chavez? I certainly cannot.
Where to begin? First of all, can anyone imagine a Bush-Cheney-Lieberman response to the Cuban Missile Crisis that would not have produced some kind of inferno? But never mind that. Lieberman disingenuously ignores Kennedy's far more important strategy of engagement with Khruschev. As for Castro himself, evidence has been surfacing in recent years of a Kennedy plan for a two-track policy toward Cuba, the second track being a "carrot"of engagement. Kennedy would have arrived at that place through a series of hard lessons, especially the Bay of Pigs. It's worth noting that Bay of Pigs-style fiascos would be one of the hallmarks of a President Lieberman foreign policy. One of his very few consistent strategies is dumping arms into the hands of any faction that, for the moment, doesn't like somebody we don't like. At the beginning of the Balkan crisis, he proposed arming Bosnian Muslims. He was still speaking to me in those days, and I tried to talk to him about the bitter lesson of Somalia, where our policy of arming one warlord against another in the Soviet pawn game had led to a wildly violent and dangerous landscape that turned bloodily against us. He was unimpressed by my reasoning.
Which leads us to Reagan and Iran. Here Lieberman is absolutely correct. Reagan did everything BUT talk to Khomeini, and the result was a series of disasters. His first notion was -- tell me if this sounds familiar -- dumping arms into the hands of somebody who didn't like Khomeini. In this case, the somebody was Saddam Hussein. Hence the wonderful picture of Rummy pressing the flesh with Saddam. His second strategy was dumping arms into the hands of somebody who didn't like Khomeini. What's that? The same strategy you say? Well, yes and no. This time we sold weapons inside Iran and wound up caught in a monumental and embarrassing lie. This was called the Iran-Contra Scandal.
This is the kind of thing Lieberman loves. Sneaky military dealings with the enemies of our enemies. With no acknowledgement that the enemies of our enemies often become our enemies. (Think Osama bin Laden.) And it somehow has not sunk in with him that this doesn't work, that it has produced in fact the very set of conditions he now deplores and now intends to address with more of the same kind of thing.
Which is how I have come to ask myself whether he is even all that bright.
http://blogs.courant.com/colin_mcenroe_to_wit/2008/05/gi-joe-again.html
Where to begin? First of all, can anyone imagine a Bush-Cheney-Lieberman response to the Cuban Missile Crisis that would not have produced some kind of inferno? But never mind that. Lieberman disingenuously ignores Kennedy's far more important strategy of engagement with Khruschev. As for Castro himself, evidence has been surfacing in recent years of a Kennedy plan for a two-track policy toward Cuba, the second track being a "carrot"of engagement. Kennedy would have arrived at that place through a series of hard lessons, especially the Bay of Pigs. It's worth noting that Bay of Pigs-style fiascos would be one of the hallmarks of a President Lieberman foreign policy. One of his very few consistent strategies is dumping arms into the hands of any faction that, for the moment, doesn't like somebody we don't like. At the beginning of the Balkan crisis, he proposed arming Bosnian Muslims. He was still speaking to me in those days, and I tried to talk to him about the bitter lesson of Somalia, where our policy of arming one warlord against another in the Soviet pawn game had led to a wildly violent and dangerous landscape that turned bloodily against us. He was unimpressed by my reasoning.
Which leads us to Reagan and Iran. Here Lieberman is absolutely correct. Reagan did everything BUT talk to Khomeini, and the result was a series of disasters. His first notion was -- tell me if this sounds familiar -- dumping arms into the hands of somebody who didn't like Khomeini. In this case, the somebody was Saddam Hussein. Hence the wonderful picture of Rummy pressing the flesh with Saddam. His second strategy was dumping arms into the hands of somebody who didn't like Khomeini. What's that? The same strategy you say? Well, yes and no. This time we sold weapons inside Iran and wound up caught in a monumental and embarrassing lie. This was called the Iran-Contra Scandal.
This is the kind of thing Lieberman loves. Sneaky military dealings with the enemies of our enemies. With no acknowledgement that the enemies of our enemies often become our enemies. (Think Osama bin Laden.) And it somehow has not sunk in with him that this doesn't work, that it has produced in fact the very set of conditions he now deplores and now intends to address with more of the same kind of thing.
Which is how I have come to ask myself whether he is even all that bright.
http://blogs.courant.com/colin_mcenroe_to_wit/2008/05/gi-joe-again.html
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