Senator Lieberman on the floor of the Senate today:
Mr. President, it's been only a year since General David Petraeus arrived in Baghdad and took command of American forces in Iraq. But in these brief 12 months, he and the American Coalition troops under his command have brought about a tectonic shift in Iraq that has altered the course of the war there, and with the future of at least two great nations--Iraq and the United States of America--and the lives of hundreds of millions of people in those two nations and so many others threatened by violent jihadist terrorists in the Middle East and beyond. Mr. President, when the surge first began a year ago, many doubted that the violence then raging in Iraq could be brought under control. Even as American troops began implementing this bold new counterinsurgency strategy, some opponents of the war inside and outside of Congress declared that the war in Iraq was already lost, that the surge had already been tried and failed, and that it mattered more, frankly, that we get out of Iraq than that we succeed in Iraq. They could not have been more wrong.
He goes on to say that al Qaeda is facing a humiliating defeat, and that "rather than admit the possibility that they [antiwar groups] had been wrong," they have shifted the debate to political reconciliation. And yet progress is now being made on that front as well, he says. He also called the Democrats out for hypocrisy--pointing out that they are trying to impose the very kind of national caveats on our troops in Iraq that we are trying to convince our European allies to lift from their troops in Afghanistan. And he did a riff on the Obama "just words" clause--citing JFK, Truman, and Roosevelt's calls to defend freedom abroad. Go Joe!