I see Lieberman thinks (via Digby) “we did the right thing in going in to overthrow Saddam.” I doubt President Jack Ryan would agree.

Ryan, of course, is the fictional hero in the Tom Clancy books. In 1996’s Executive Orders, Jack assumes the presidency after a terrorist flies an airliner, loaded with jet fuel, into the Capitol building during a joint session of Congress. Shortly thereafter, Saddam Hussein is taken out – by an Iranian assassin – and Iran ends up with enormous control over Iraq because of the resulting instability.

Unlike Joe, President Ryan saw Saddam’s removal as a national security threat. During Ryan’s meeting with a Saudi prince, Clancy writes:

The issue was less about oil than about faith. … Every state on the Gulf feared Iran for its size, for its large population, and for the religious fervor of its citizens. … The Saudis had never wanted Iraq’s President to fall. Enemy though he was, apostate though he was, aggressor though he was, he had fulfilled a useful strategic purpose for his neighbors. Iraq had long been a buffer between the Gulf states and Iran. It was a case in which religion played second fiddle to politics, which thereby served religious purposes. By rejecting the Word of Allah, Iraq’s Shi’a population was taken out of play, and the dual border with Kuwait and the Kingdom was one of mere politics, not religion. But if the Ba’ath Party fell along with its leader, then Iraq might revert to majority religious rule. That would put a Shi’a country on the two borders, and the leader of the Shi’a branch of Islam was Iran. …

[The power vaccuum problem created by Saddam’s removal] was the reason the Persian Gulf War had been fought for limited military objectives, and not to overthrow the aggressor. The Saudis, who had from the beginning charted the war’s strategic objectives, had never allowed America or her allies even to consider a drive to Baghdad, and this despite the fact that with Iraq’s army deployed in and around Kuwait, the Iraqi capital had been as exposed as a nudist on a beach. Ryan had remarked at the time, watching the talking heads on various TV news shows, that not a single one of the commentators remarked that a textbook campaign would have totally ignored Kuwait, seized Baghdad, and then waited for the Iraqi army to stack arms and surrender. Well, not eveyone could read a map.

Recent history, however, has revealed the strategies in Clancy’s fanstasy to be all wrong. First, no one could have imagined that terrorists would fly airplanes into buildings – that’s just completely unbelievable. Second, everyone knows Joe is correct that we did “the right thing” in removing Saddam because we are all “safer” as a result. Finally, the real reason we didn’t go all the way to Baghdad to remove Saddam the first time was because we wimped out.

Vote Joe (Joe-CT)!