Sometimes it pays to revisit history. On February 4, 2002, the Financial Times (LexisNexis) reported about the security meeting in Munich.
Annual meetings in Munich of top defence experts from both sides of the Atlantic have traditionally been a celebration – critical but overwhelmingly positive – of the transatlantic partnership underpinning Nato.
This year was different.
This weekend, what is now called the Munich security conference attracted politicians and defence experts from Russia, China, India and Pakistan, as well as most of eastern Europe, central Asia – and Nato.
It also established a new tone. The largest-ever US delegation, headed by Paul Wolfowitz, the hawkish deputy defence secretary, and including a bevy of Senators and congressmen, warned their hesitant allies that in the war against terrorism they could not remain neutral.
For their part, the Europeans spelt out their growing concerns over President George W. Bush’s characterisation of an “axis of evil” including Iran, Iraq and North Korea with forces of global terrorism.
Mr Wolfowitz spelt out the implications of last week’s state of the union address by Mr Bush, in a hard-hitting speech that took no hostages.
He praised Nato for invoking article V of its constitution – declaring that the September 11 attacks on the US amounted to an attack on the whole alliance. He thanked the allies for sending Awacs aircraft to patrol the US skies, allowing US aircraft to be switched to Afghanistan. And he made it clear that Washington would continue to decide what help it would ask for. His speech was about “coalitions of the willing”, not Nato solidarity.
“We’re at war,” he declared. “Our approach has to aim at prevention, and not merely punishment.” He quoted his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, as saying that self-defence “requires prevention and sometimes pre-emption”.
“The only defence against terrorism is to take the war to the enemy,” he said. “The best defence is a good offence. Facing that danger, countries must make a choice. Those that stand for peace, security and the rule of law . . . standing united with us in this struggle between good and evil. Those countries that choose to tolerate terrorism and refuse to take action . . . will face the consequences.”
Doesn’t that bring back a lot of happy memories? I know I just love thinking about 2002…the year our government decided to terrorize us on a daily basis. There was a Senator from Connecticut and a Senator from Arizona at that Munich conference. They said something quite interesting.
“Dictators that harbour terrorists and build weapons of mass destruction are now on notice that such behaviour is, in itself, a casus belli,” said Senator John McCain, the senior Republican. “Nowhere is such an ultimatum more applicable that in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”
Senator Joe Lieberman, Democratic candidate for vice president at the last election, agreed: “We cannot claim victory in our war against terrorism until we decisively address the profound threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction,” he said.
Oh, those pesky weapons of mass destruction. Will they never stop coming back to haunt us?
On August 28, 2002, the Rocky Mountain News (LexisNexis) reported on a trip Joe Lieberman took to Colorado to help campaign for Ted Strickland’s failed Senate campaign. While he was there he dropped by the Hebrew Educational Alliance in Denver and did a little Q & A. Someone asked him about Iraq and he said that the President should focus less on threatening Iraq and more on explaining why Saddam should be toppled. Then he said this (emphasis mine):
“Part of the anxiety that I hear from the American people is that we’re going to end up doing this alone without our allies from Europe, the Arab world or any place else in the world,” Lieberman said.
“We could do it successfully alone, but we ought to have some of our allies in the Arab world with us.”
On October 3, 2002 The Glasgow Herald reported:
Senator Joe Lieberman, a potential rival of Mr Bush in the 2004 presidential election, said the US administration had explored all options, other than military, to disarm Saddam. “The moment of truth has arrived for Saddam Hussein. This is his last chance.”
Here’s Lieberman responding to Colin Powell’s phony-baloney presentation to the United Nations. (February 6, 2003, USA Today, LexisNexis)
“Patience is a virtue, but too much patience with dangerous lawlessness is a vice,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who has long urged tough U.S. policy toward Saddam.
But here is my favorite from the pre-war genre of Lieberman praise. It comes from Cragg Hines in the Houston Chronicle (March 19, 2003, LexisNexis).
TOSS in a whiff of tear gas and a strand of hippie beads, and it could almost be the late 1960s, early 1970s again. Especially in the Democratic Party. Before a missile has even banged into Baghdad this time around, the prospect of a U.S.-led war against Iraq has reopened deep wounds for the party of Lyndon Johnson, Gene McCarthy and George McGovern.
It’s not a pretty sight.
Several Democratic presidential contenders are in full pander to the large, vocal anti-war wing of their party and have begun to savage rival candidates who, because of their wider and in most cases more experienced international vision, support disarming Saddam Hussein by military means, the course that has now become necessary.
At the moment, opposition to the war is about the only issue that is keeping afloat the campaign of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, whose edgy rhetoric and earnest fist flailing are titillating trendy salons on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (across Central Park from where he actually was raised) and the environs of ZIP code 90210 on the Left Coast.
Dean combines the twin faults that British Prime Minister Tony Blair (a one-time Laborite unilateral disarmer, remember) laid Tuesday on his nation’s anti-war Liberal Democratic Party: “opportunism and error.”…(snip)
The Democratic candidates who support military action against Saddam – Sens. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, John Edwards of North Carolina, John Kerry of Massachusetts and Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri – have borne the criticism of Dean to date without much of a counterattack. They shouldn’t.
Some of the candidates say privately that they are waiting for the March 31 campaign finance reports to gauge how much traction Dean’s anti-war stance is garnering, at least among the somewhat rarefied donor class. The theory goes that if Dean is not catching on with the givers then any talk of his posing a serious threat is anecdotal at best – and why draw more attention to him.
But serious Democratic contenders need to address head-on the threat posed to the party by Dean and the other spawn of the succession of losers from McGovern to Michael Dukakis. And they don’t have to go for a tank ride to do it.
If Joe Lieberman had a ‘wider…more experienced international vision’ that led him to ‘support disarming Saddam Hussein by military means’ then there must be something wrong with the people that have experience in foreign policy in this country.
