12-03-05, 8:54 am

Joe Lieberman, esteemed senator from Connecticut and former vice presidential candidate, smokes crack, in large amounts and on a regular basis. I am in possession of reams of secret evidence confirming this claim, but unfortunately cannot make it public because it might reveal crucial methods and sources to America's enemies. Still, you can trust me. I'm a good guy, the kind you might like to drink a beer with.

If you insist, I will be happy to release this secret dossier (subscription required, unfortunately), carefully compiled from the pages of the top-secret Wall Street Journal.

On Tuesday, poor unfortunate Joe wrote an op-ed in the Journal that put President Bush's relentless blind Pollyannaism to shame. Here's a good line: In my meeting with the thoughtful prime minister of Iraq, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, he declared with justifiable pride that his country now has the most open, democratic political system in the Arab world. He is right. It's hard even to knew where to begin with that one. A country that shows torture victims' confessions on TV. A country where women don't leave the house without a hijab for fear of harassment. A country where 169 people are held and tortured in a basement by the main group in the government. A country where death squad victims turn up in the streets every day. A country where 82% of the people oppose the occupation, but it continues.

Here's more: Progress is visible and practical. ... There are many more cars on the streets, satellite television dishes on the roofs, and literally millions more cell phones in Iraqi hands than before. All of that says the Iraqi economy is growing. In other words, the lack of stability in Iraq, which has meant depressed oil exports, has contributed to an explosion in the price of oil. The U.S. failure in this arena is, paradoxically, propping it up.

There are millions of cell phones in part because, after two and a half years, the land lines have not been dependably fixed.

Lieberman also tries to claim success by pointing to poll results that say Iraqis on the whole expect things to be better 1 year from now. The reason for this, of course, is that they believe they've hit bottom, not that they like what has been done in the past two and a half years.

This is my favorite part: 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 Qaeda foreign fighters who know their wretched causes will be set back if Iraq becomes free and modern. The terrorists are intent on stopping this by instigating a civil war to produce the chaos that will allow Iraq to replace Afghanistan as the base for their fanatical war-making. 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. Even Bush's much-vaunted 'National Strategy for Victory in Iraq' is more nuanced than this.

It classifies the insurgency into three groups, in decreasing order of size: 'rejectionists' (unaffiliated Sunni Arabs who oppose the end of Sunni Arab privilege), Saddam loyalists/former regime elements, and (the smallest group) terrorist jihadis. Even Bush is admitting that not all the insurgents are terrorists, but Joe doesn't.

It's hard to find too many Republicans these days as gung-ho about the war as Joe.

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