Joe Lieberman, the U.S. Senator from Connecticut—speaking on Wednesday evening after President George Bush addressed Americans on deployment of additional troops for Baghdad—observed: “I applaud the President for rejecting the fatalism of failure and pursuing a new course to achieve success in Iraq.”
Lieberman was the running mate of Vice President Al Gore on the Democratic ticket for the 2000 U.S. presidential election, losing to the Republican ticket of George Bush and Dick Cheney.
But when Lieberman supported the Bush administration’s Iraq policy through the difficult months preceding the November 2006 mid-term elections, his party abandoned him in the primary as he campaigned for retaining his seat in the Senate.
Lieberman’s victory as an independent in a heavily Democratic and liberal leaning state repudiated the mainstream media presentation of the November election results as a referendum against the Iraq war.
Lieberman has emerged as the representative of a bygone era in American politics when bipartisanship meant domestic political divisions ceased at the water’s edge, and Americans stood united when confronting the common foe of freedom and democracy at home and abroad.
As sectarian violence escalated in Iraq, Bush was increasingly presented by the media as an embattled leader in a war opposed by a majority of Americans.
But in speaking from the White House, Bush looked less embattled in Iraq than he is with the new Democratic majority in the Congress, its party elders obsessed with ghosts of failure from the Vietnam War and empty of any constructive ideas of how to defeat radical Islamism in its native grounds.
Bush remains as clear and consistent on the need to defeat radical Islamism as he was on the day he inspected the smoking ruins of the twin towers in New York City and the Pentagon building outside of Washington.
Bush acknowledged difficulties in Iraq with the widening sectarian conflict and increasing pressures on the elected government in Baghdad to provide security for Iraqis.
But difficulties are to be met and overcome, and Bush restated his administration’s commitment to help Iraq achieve something new in the Arab world—“a functioning democracy that polices its territory, upholds the rule of law, respects fundamental human liberties, and answers to its people.”
A democratic Iraq, Bush observed, “will not be perfect. But it will be a country that fights terrorists instead of harbouring them—and it will bring a future of peace and security.”
There is an admirable stubbornness in Bush that reminds one of the bulldog characteristics of tenacity and courage displayed by Churchill in the darkest hours for freedom when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany.
Stubbornness without purpose becomes fanaticism, or as George Santayana wrote, “fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”
Bush’s firmness comes from his conviction that winning or losing in Iraq will be as decisive for America and its allies in the present century as defeating fascism and containing communism were in the last century.
He has understood well the nature of the contemporary beast, radical Islamism, and its intent to do great harm indiscriminately, as Churchill understood the beasts of his time.
Bush also instinctively understands, despite critics in the Congress and the media, what Churchill understood being partly American when he said: “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”
The right thing as Bush has repeatedly said, with which Lieberman and others of similar persuasion agree, is to trash the ideology of radical Islamism as were done to those of fascism and communism in maintaining freedom and spreading democracy.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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