Joe Lieberman, March 20th, 2003:

What we are doing here is not only in the interest of the safety of the American people. Believe me, Saddam Hussein would have used these weapons against us eventually or given them to terrorists who would have. But what we are doing here, in overthrowing Saddam and removing those weapons of mass destruction and taking them into our control, is good for the security of people all over the world, including the Iraqi people themselves.

This is a task of high justice, necessity, and idealism in the best tradition of American principles and patriotism. And I'm proud and grateful that we have the kind of fighting force that we have over there -- and the strong families back at home sending their love and support.

We have suffered as a nation through three years of a war justified by false intelligence, sold as being an absolute "necessity," and conducted with complete incompetence by our political leaders.

Joe Lieberman has never asked tough questions of President Bush through any of these phases. He has failed his constituents and his nation.

He has never provided the critical and independent thinking that might have saved our nation from - or at least mitigated - this great foreign policy debacle, a point Zbigniew Brzezinski insightfully raised yesterday:

What troubles me the most is not that which that I have criticized, but that which hasn't happened. That is to say: a serious and comprehensive Democratic challenge on this subject. Democratic leaders have been silent or evasive. They have not offered an alternative to the war in Iraq. It's easy to criticize – that was the first part of my speech. That is easy to do, although some of us did it sooner than others.

But they haven't offered an alternative. Also they have not seriously challenged the view of the world that is being propagated from the top. At a time of a deepening and widening crisis in Iraq, and a widening gap between America and the world, that to me is a form of political desertion.

Joe Lieberman, a neoconservative in the most accurate sense of the word, has made such a challenge all but impossible. To use Brzenzinski's words, he has led the charge of "political desertion" on national security.

Joe is a senator who likes to call himself "independent-minded." But when it counted most, in a matter of war and peace, in a matter of national security, in a matter of the most significant strategic importance for our nation in decades, Joe Lieberman has been exactly the opposite - a cowed, uncritical, rubber-stamp supporter of a failed policy.

Joe Lieberman has failed his country for three years straight, and worse, shows absolutely no signs of changing, even while many Republicans already have. As Harry Reid has said, "Joe is a fine man, he has strong feelings, but he's just alone. Even Republicans don't agree with Joe."

In many ways, it's three years too late to be having a debate on this. But better today than three years from now - three more years of mindlessly defending incompetence.