Lieberman did, in fact, sing the "for the war, critical of the execution" song for a time back in 2003 when he was running for president. Had he stuck with that tune -- the one intoned by Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and many other Democrats who managed not to draw serious primary challengers -- he'd almost certainly be in excellent shape today. Instead, he ran his career into the ground with things like his May 14, 2004, Wall Street Journal op-ed subtitled "Why Rumsfeld Must Stay." (As he put it a week prior to that op-ed's publication, "we're in the middle of a war -- you wouldn't want to have the secretary of defense change unless there's really good reason for it and I don't see any good reason at this time.") In December 2005 he made the remark that's done more than anything else to put him in his current precarious situation: "It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he'll be commander-in-chief for three more years. We undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril."

These were the sentiments that made Lieberman a true outlier in his own party. Rather than a simple split between hawks and doves, there are essentially four camps of Democrats on the Iraq question: first, the true doves, people like Carl Levin and Robert Byrd, who said invading Iraq was a bad idea before it happened; second, the repentant hawks, people like John Edwards and John Kerry (and, for that matter, Matthew Yglesias), who backed invasion back in late 2002 and now see it was a terrible mistake; third, the critical hawks like Clinton and Biden who recognize Iraq has become a disaster but lay the blame for the fiasco at the feet of Bush's mismanagement of the enterprise; last was a camp long inhabited only by Lieberman and Republicans -- the straight-up hawks who insisted the war was still going well.

Lieberman's return to the critical nest will probably come too late to earn him the Democratic nomination today. It may, however, still be enough to allow him to win the general election. And even if it's too late for that to happen, it is certainly the case that if the senator hadn't spent so much time as a full-throated hawk, he wouldn't be having his current problems -- a little partisanship and Bush-bashing are really all the party's angry doves are currently asking of their politicians.

And that's too bad. One has to wonder about the sanity of a politician who, contrary to his political interests, can sniff a pile of manure and announce it has the scent of roses. The position does, however, have a certain coherence to it. What's more, it reflects Lieberman's honest and long-held approach to foreign policy -- namely, taking the most hawkish position possible on whatever issue happens to be under debate at the moment. Peter Beinart sees this as an admirable iconoclasm, while I'd say "demented militarism" better fits the bill. Nevertheless, it's a view.

It's hard to know, by contrast, what it is the critical hawks (the Biden-Clinton wing) actually have to say about America's role in the world and the appropriate use of force. Trying to defend the Bush administration's competence is a good way to make an ass out of yourself, but it simply isn't very plausible to explain the current mess as being the result of a sound idea that was poorly executed.

One wonders, in particular, what conclusions the Clintons and Bidens of the world have drawn from this analysis. Bush and the right, though somewhat chastened by Iraq, still believe in the fundamental strategy encapsulated by Dick Cheney's dictum that "we don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it." Thus, there can be no meaningful diplomacy with Syria, Iran, or North Korea, and instead we must bide our time and plot regime change. Are the critical hawks promising us a similar approach once Bush is out of office and a newer, more competent team is in place? Do they really think they have a team of super-administrators ready to install themselves in Tehran and turn Iran into a happy, pro-American liberal democracy after an invasion?

Frankly, I doubt they do. But if they don't, they ought to say so and bring themselves to admit that there's a certain integrity to Lieberman's pre-election-eve stance: if you want to defend the war, you ought to defend the war. If, more reasonably, you recognize that the war is a fiasco, you need to admit that it was actually mistaken, based on a profoundly misguided view of the world and of American grand strategy.

Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.

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