Per Isaac's reply to my original post: I'm conflicted about what to do regarding Iran. What I can say, however, is that the attacks being waged against Joe Lieberman are unproductive. Calling out Iran for its proxy war against us does not necessarily mean that one supports sending troops to Tehran, no more than acknowledging the very existence of the Cold War entailed support for bombing Moscow. What Lieberman has done is state what ought to be obvious: we are engaged in the initial stages of some sort of low-intensity war with Iran. As such, how is Iran a potential partner in stabilizing Iraq, as many in the Democratic establishment suggest? As for the Iraq Liberation Act: it did not merely call for regime change in the abstract, as Isaac implies; it was not akin to a resolution congratulating some Boy Scout Troop. It provided military assistance to opposition groups so as to spur an internal rebellion. Bill Clinton signed it into law whilst Saddam was violating numerous Security Council resolutions that permitted military enforcement. He himself executed military attacks against Saddam. Voting for the ILA did not necessarily require support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq five years later. But nor was the ILA some pie-in-the-sky resolution entailing no real world consequences, and neither is Lieberman's amendment. And so what the near-unanimous support for this amendment demonstrates is that there exists a serious disconnect between the popular left-wing bloggers calling its author names (who simultaneously seem casually indifferent about a country killing our soldiers), and Democratic senators. There is something seriously wrong when liberal bloggers get outraged not by Iranian agents killing our troops but by the senator who says that those actions ought to have consequences. And that leads to the final point about those "tiresome, 5,000-word articles linking Ahmed Chalabi, PNAC and Paul Wolfowitz." Of course, Chalabi, PNAC and Wolfowitz were linked. But quite a few liberals have signed PNAC letters over the years, including some on the masthead of this magazine. It's therefore frustrating to see people like Hillary Clinton now call Iraq "George Bush's War." She supported this war, her husband signed the act providing its genesis, and he launched multiple military strikes against the Saddam regime. This is a completely separate issue from the awful way in which the war has been waged, but it's irresponsible for once-supportive liberal critics to pass off the Iraq War as some neo-con plot, denying any and all responsibility when political support for it was widespread. P.S.: I ought to clarify my assertion that "left-wing bloggers...seem casually indifferent about a country killing our soldiers," which, read the wrong way, comes off as callous. By this I do not mean that liberal bloggers don't care about the soldiers who have been killed by Iranian agents, but that this phenomenon--as opposed to the killing of American troops by Sunni insurgents--and its political implications do not seem to phase them or their analysis of the situation. --James Kirchick