Lieberman Optimistic, America Mission Doomed!

Joe Lieberman was in Baghdad today on a "surprise visit" and told a CNN correspondent that he saw progress and that "he did believe that this surge eventually would pay off and it would start to break the insurgency."

Of course, that means we're doomed.

Lieberman's always been optimistic about the war in Iraq but things keep getting worse.

Here's Lieberman in November 2005 (via Glenn Greenwald).

Does America have a good plan for doing this, a strategy for victory in Iraq? Yes we do. . . Mistakes, some of them big, were made after Saddam was removed, and no one who supports the war should hesitate to admit that; but we have learned from those mistakes and, in characteristic American fashion, from what has worked and not worked on the ground in Iraq. The administration's recent use of the banner "clear, hold, and build" accurately describes the strategy as I saw it being implemented last week.

Lieberman is just as optimistic about the surge as he was about the "clear, hold, build" strategy of 2005. Unfortunately, "clear, hold, and build" is also the concept behind the surge. It's just that Petraeus is going to put American outposts in Iraqi neighborhoods as the core of his "hold" strategy.

And it's still not working.

Far from "breaking" the insurgency, the surge has made the Sunni insurgents stronger. American troops have not been putting nearly the pressure on the Sunni insurgents that the Shiite death squads had been putting on them after the bombing of the Samarra dome. Consequently, Sunni insurgents are more active in the Baghdad area with more car bombings and more attacks on Shiite marketplaces, funerals, and gathering spots. That's why overall deaths in Iraq are still high even though the "sectarian" killings by Shiite death squads are down.

Maybe we'd do better if Joe Lieberman was a pessimistic worry wart.