The Connecticut Senate primary between Democratic incumbent Joseph Lieberman and challenger Ned Lamont will be held tomorrow. Mr. Lamont is running as an anti-war candidate. At the heart of anti-war ideology is a belief that attacks against America from radical Islamic groups and governments have become an unchangeable feature of the international system. Anti-war politicians ask the American people to be “adult” and accept that enemies possessing both the means and the intention to attack the United States will always exist, so the American people must accept casualties arising from terrorism — even mass casualties — as a permanent facet of modern life.
I would direct you to the subsection of Mr. Lamont’s campaign website where he discusses these concepts, but I can’t because the War on Terror is not important enough to Mr. Lamont to warrant its own section on the site. In Mr. Lamont’s opinion, apparently, there is no War on Terror to discuss. He is thus anti-war in a literal sense — he rejects the idea that attacks on the American mainland, by themselves, constitute acts of war. He doesn’t look on potential foreign attackers as enemies to be defeated before they do grave harm, but as problems to be managed after an attack. (He does have a section on the War in Iraq, but I’m assuming he accepts standard Democratic boilerplate about there being “no connection” between the War on Terror and the war in Iraq).
Ultimately then, Mr. Lamont endorses a program of 1) dismissing the War on Terror as not central to American foreign policy, 2) maximum cut-and-run from Iraq and 3) appeasement of violent elements in the Middle East (see Martin Peretz in today’s OpinionJournal for more details on this subject). Mr. Lamont’s position — that the War that started on September 11 is over and the only things left to do now are walk away from Iraq, wait for future attacks on the US to occur, and then respond if we first get permission — is increasingly becoming the position of the Democrat establishment. But if Mr. Lamont believes that his views on this subject reflect those of the American people, then why doesn’t he give a position on the war on his campaign site?