Friday, August 11, 2006

Embedded in an article about the political fallout from Ned Lamont's victory in the Connecticut Democratic primaries, Jacob Weisberg makes the following point:
Lieberman's opponents are not entirely wrong about the war. The invasion of Iraq was, in ways that have since become hard to dispute, a terrible mistake. There were no weapons of mass destruction to be dismantled, we had no plan for occupying the country, and our troops remain there only to prevent the civil war we unleashed from turning into a bigger and more horrific civil war. Just about everyone now agrees that the sooner we find a way to withdraw, the better for us and for the Iraqis. The problem for the Democrats is that the anti-Lieberman insurgents go far beyond simply opposing Bush's faulty rationale for the war, his dishonest argumentation for it, and his incompetent execution of it. Many of them appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously. They see Iraq purely as a symptom of a cynical and politicized right-wing response to Sept. 11, as opposed to a tragic misstep in a bigger conflict. Substantively, this view indicates a fundamental misapprehension of the problem of terrorism. Politically, it points the way to perpetual Democratic defeat.
I must agree with Jacob that those who harp on the faulty rationale for the Iraq War don't seem to fully appreciate the larger and very different threat of radical Islam. Still, one can't blame them when 50% of the American public believes Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, up from 36% last year.