Lieberman: We Must Stay in Iraq

Fresh from his fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months, Sen. Joe Lieberman insists the U.S. must stay in the embattled nation and not abandon "27 million Iraqis to 10,000 terrorists."

"The Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood – unless the great American military that has given them and us this unexpected opportunity is prematurely withdrawn," the Connecticut Democrat writes in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal.

Pointing to economic and political progress he witnessed while in Iraq, Lieberman said:

"People are working their way toward a functioning society and economy in the midst of a very brutal, inhumane, sustained terrorist war against the civilian population and the Iraqi and American military there to protect it.

"It is a war between 27 million and 10,000; 27 million Iraqis who want to live lives of freedom, opportunity and prosperity and roughly 10,000 terrorists who are either Saddam revanchists, Iraqi Islamic extremists or al-Qaida foreign fighters who know their wretched causes will be set back if Iraq becomes free and modern ...

"We are fighting on the side of the 27 million because the outcome of this war is critically important to the security and freedom of America. If the terrorists win, they will be emboldened to strike us directly again and to further undermine the growing stability and progress in the Middle East."

Lieberman is encouraged by the numbers of Iraqis who have gone to the polls despite the threat of violence, by Sunni participation in the electoral process and by the thriving independent media in Iraq.

"None of these remarkable changes would have happened without the coalition forces led by the U.S.," Lieberman writes.

"And, I am convinced, almost all of the progress in Iraq and throughout the Middle East will be lost if those forces are withdrawn faster than the Iraqi military is capable of securing the country.

"I am disappointed by Democrats who are more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq almost three years ago, and by Republicans who are more worried about whether the war will bring them down in next November's elections, than they are concerned about how we continue the progress in Iraq in the months and years ahead.

"What a colossal mistake it would be for America's bipartisan political leadership to choose this moment in history to lose its will and, in the famous phrase, to seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory."