Senator Joe Lieberman (Independent, Conn.) delivered a fantastic speech on May 16 to a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
And this part is dead-on accurate:
Part of the disagreement we face over Iraq comes down to a genuine difference of opinion.
On the one hand, there are those who believe, as I do, that the struggle against Islamist extremism really is the central challenge of our time, and that, as General David Petraeus - our commander in Iraq - recently said, Iraq is now the central front of the war against Islamist extremism.
On the other hand, there are those who reject this view - who genuinely believe that the threat of Islamist extremism is overstated, or that Iraq is a distraction from the “real” war on terror, or that the war there is lost, or not worth fighting to win.
It is my deeply held conviction that these people are not only wrong, they are disastrously wrong - and that the withdrawal they demand would be a moral and security catastrophe for the United States, for Iraq, and for the entire Middle East, including Israel and our moderate Arab allies.
I agree with the Senator. Are there some people who simply oppose the war on principle? Sure. But the majority of people fall into one of the above factions of opinion described by Sen. Lieberman.
You either believe Islamist extremism is a threat or you don’t.
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Actually, there is a one more category — people who acknowledge that Islamist extremism is a threat, but that we should sit down and reason and compromise with them, rather than fight them.
These people are the most frustrating to deal with, because they are so detached from reality as to be impossible to reason with — anybody who thinks that people capable of 9/11, capable of Daniel Pearl, capable of PFC Kristian Menchaca, capable of stoning to death 14-year old girls, capable of killing people because they were offended by a cartoon? — anybody who truly thinks that we can negotiate with Islamic extremist have never met an Islamic extremist.
