Hawkish Little Minds

Spencer Ackerman calls it "the hobgoblin of a little mind":

But belligerence isn't the same thing as wisdom -- and hawkishness does not always lead to a safer America... Indeed, Lieberman's judgment on defense questions is like that of a stopped clock: the hawkish position, applied consistently, has to be right sooner or later. What Lieberman is asking Connecticut -- and the Democratic Party, and the country -- to accept is that the only secure America is a bellicose America. And that position is a guarantee of future Iraqs.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Lieberman's defense record is the difficulty of defining Liebermanism. On the central question of why a nation should or shouldn't go to war, Lieberman's answer is simply, "yes!"

I've never understood why the willingness to shoot/bomb anything that moves is considered being strong on national security. In reality, those like Lieberman who never met a war they didn't like smack of nothing but political opportunism. As Digby says,

You can be craven about a lot of things, but war is one issue you really should think twice about. Not only is it a moral question it is a most serious question of national security. Once you unleash the dogs of war, all kinds of unintended, catastrophic things can happen as we are now witnessing in Iraq. It should never be just a matter of politics.

There's also this bit from Ackerman:

If there's one myth that neocons have cultivated -- and the media have bought into -- since their post-Vietnam origins in the 1970s, it's that the greater danger to U.S. security comes not from disastrous wars but from overzealous opposition to disastrous wars.

"Planet Beltway", as Paul Krugman aptly called the D.C./media establishment, always advanced this ridiculous theory. It's like blaming a car accident on the passengers who cautioned the driver to slow down instead of blaming the speeding driver to begin with.

Yet this is exactly how Lieberman and other warhawks think. To them, the willingness to use force, whether force is the right answer or not, is always the default position.

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