Lieberman: Lugar wrong about Iraq surge’s failure

Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut yesterday challenged Republican Sen. Richard G. Lugar’s ballyhooed assessment that the U.S. troop surge in Iraq is doomed to fail.

“The early evidence is that [the surge] is working,” said Mr. Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic vice-presidential nominee who was forced to switch party affiliation to independent last year partly because of his hawkish stance on Iraq.

“We’ve got a fight ahead of us. We’re not deceiving ourselves,” he said at a Capitol Hill press conference.

“But in the end,” he said, “it’s just unfair to our troops implementing the surge, to Gen. [David] Petraeus, who helped create this totally different strategy — which is working — to essentially pull the rug out from under them, to take away their reason for fighting before they even have a chance.”

Mr. Lugar did not return calls seeking comment.

Mr. Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said he agreed with parts of Mr. Lugar’s speech Monday, which Democrats seized upon as evidence that Republicans were defecting from President Bush.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who vows to force an early end to the war, called Mr. Lugar’s speech a “turning point” in the Iraq debate, which is scheduled to resume today as the Senate takes up the defense spending authorization bill.

Mr. Lieberman said that Mr. Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, observed correctly that several vital national-security interests rest on the outcome of the war, including the need to keep Iran and al Qaeda in check and stop sectarian violence from spilling across Iraq’s borders.

But Mr. Lieberman strongly objected to Mr. Lugar’s call to “downsize the U.S. military’s role in Iraq,” the portion of the speech most often cited by Democrats.

“I think it would be a tragic error to begin to withdraw from Iraq now, because the winners from that withdrawal would not be America,” he said. “It would be Iran and al Qaeda. And the losers would be Iraq and all of our allies in the region.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who joined Mr. Lieberman at the press conference, said U.S. politicians were at fault, not the troops and military leaders.

“The enemy’s on the run through the surge,” he said. “Militarily it is working. The enemies that we face in Iraq are really being defeated and contained and being pushed, but they continue to fight.”

The troop surge reached its full strength of 140,000 troops about three weeks ago, and violence has spiked as U.S. forces ferret out terrorists and insurgents in and around Baghdad.