Joseph Lieberman
November 8, 2007

In case you missed it: "This is a family feud for me." —Joseph Lieberman

Senator Joseph Lieberman, “Independent Democrat” from Connecticut, spoke on November 8 about the problems with today’s Democratic Party, criticizing the party for its policies and its partisanship, which he says harm the country’s national security.

According to Lieberman, the Democratic Party’s guiding principle in choosing foreign policy is its distrust for the Bush administration, and as a result, the party’s positions always oppose those of the administration. Lieberman says they go so far as to oppose President Bush’s policy positions even when this means going against their own convictions or the hard facts of the situation.

Lieberman cites the decision to go to war in Iraq as an example of the Democratic Party’s knee jerk opposition to President Bush. He says that Democrats should have supported the war because it was justified in quintessentially liberal terms as a fight to spread democracy and end oppression.

“I felt strongly that the Democrats should embrace the basic framework that President Bush articulated for the War on Terror as our own, because it was our own,” says Lieberman. “We could rightly criticize the Bush administration when it failed to live up to its own rhetoric or when it bungled the execution of its policies, but I felt we should not minimize the seriousness of the threat from Islamic extremism or the fundamental rightness of the strong international and morally assertive policies that President Bush had chosen in response to it.”

Lieberman says he feels that the Democrats’ opposition to the war in Iraq went against their traditional foreign policy positions. He describes the Democratic Party with which he grew up as militarily strong and morally sure.

“It was a party that grasped the inextricable link between the survival of freedom abroad and the survival here at home,” remembers Lieberman. “It was also a party that understood that a progressive society in a complicated world must be ready and willing to use its military power in defense of its progressive ideals in order to ensure that those progressive ideals survive.”

According to Lieberman, the legacy of Vietnam and mistrust of the current administration have led the Democrats to do a complete about face in their foreign policy direction. The Vietnam War left the party “reflexively skeptical about America’s right to make moral judgments about the rest of the world” while paranoia about the Bush administration leads to “reflexive opposition to this president.”

“It’s troubling to me that it’s among the Republican presidential candidates that I find more resonance to the kind of foreign policy positions that I believe are traditionally are the best and strongest for democrats,” Lieberman laments.
 Lieberman cites as another example the recent amendment to declare the Iranian Republican Guard a terrorist organization, which he proposed in the Senate and which passed only after Democrats removed its more harsh language. He says he thought Democrats would support that initiative without a second thought.

“To put it mildly, I was wrong,” says Lieberman. “What happened instead is, for me, a case study in the distrust and partisan polarization that now poisons our body politic on even the most sensitive issues of America’s national security.”

Lieberman says that when it comes to national security and foreign policy, parties have to learn to put aside their differences and support the policies that best promote American interests, even when it means working across the aisle.

“I wish that both parties in this hyper partisan time could separate out foreign policy and national security, have our disagreements, but ultimately come together,” he says.

According to Lieberman, he calls himself an independent democrat because he is willing to agree with Republicans when their positions match his convictions that America should be a strong moral force in the world.

“Don’t become so wedded to your party that you are unwilling to diverge from it when your convictions diverge from it,” he advises students. “Let your views about national security and foreign policy determine your politics rather than the other way around.”