Dear Senator Lieberman: By now it’s apparent that the majority of your party has taken leave of its senses with regard to the war. It was bad enough that Senator Kerry courted the likes of Michael Moore to energize the base in last year’s presidential election. But now it’s as if the leaders of the Democratic Party have morphed into those marginal bedfellows it befriended in 2004.

The latest talking points are reviving those canards about a cabal deceiving the public and its representatives to fight an optional war. It must make you nauseous. Senator Reid has now made it a priority to pressure the intelligence committee to release a report on how the administration used the intelligence from the CIA that you know full well supported the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Senator Durbin is now saying the Justice Department ought to subpoena Ahmad Chalabi, a man you know well. Sadly, the party of Truman and Kennedy today looks like a gaggle of spoiled children pandering on about their pre-war gullibility. “We were lied to,” so many Democrats now say.

For the sake of the country and your party, you should speak out. You are the man to do it for a few reasons. You have some experience in bucking your leadership, like your sage decision to criticize President Clinton during the intern scandal. Your floor speech created a space between Republicans demanding impeachment and those of your party pretending that a president’s sexual predations were vagaries that did not deserve public scrutiny.

The stakes this time are much higher. As a Democrat you need to make the case again for our war in part because the White House has failed to do. Their ability to remind the country why we went to war is complicated by the blowback for stupidly launching an anonymous campaign against Joseph Wilson when his tall tales could have been refuted on the record. And this decision is compounded by their political and policy errors after the war and their failure to cultivate allies on the war from your side of the aisle.

You are just the person to rise above the muck from both sides in this debate and make the case again for fighting for an elected government, laying out the enormous benefits of victory and catastrophe of defeat.

You could remind your colleagues of how Saddam Hussein threatened to shoot down surveillance planes and would not allow inspectors to interview his weapons scientists without chaperones when given a final opportunity to comply with U.N. Security Council resolution 1441.You could also point out how so much of the basic arguments for the invasion, not to mention intelligence, were used time and again by Mr. Clinton. And you might also want to remind some of your more cynical colleagues that it tests the imagination to believe that Ahmad Chalabi alone could have engineered the intelligence fraud so many democrats are saying he did.

You can back up such a presentation with results of bipartisan reports, not to mention official studies from Britain and Israel. You could offer men like Senator Rockefeller their words back, by digging up some of his statements before the war. And finally you could make the eminently moral case that at the very least we rid Iraqis of a terrible dictator our country had some role in bolstering during the Iran-Iraq war.

These arguments are not new for you. After all, you were among the legislators of both parties that supported the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998. As you said on March 20, 2003, “This is a task of high justice, necessity, and idealism in the best tradition of American principles and patriotism.”

So why have you been silent? Yes, it’s true you have drafted some op-eds noting some of the progress in Iraq such as the passage of the constitution. But for the most part you have sat on your hands as your colleagues spin these fictions about the war we are fighting. Are you afraid of the moral midgets atmoveon.com? Are worried what the left wing blogosphere might say? You don’t need me to tell you that the voters are not the only ones listening.

The effect of the “Bush lied. Who died?” campaign is to tell our soldiers fighting this war they are risking their lives for a fraud. Meanwhile, this political gambit must give Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his terrorists renewed confidence that they will be able to outlast us in Iraq. I’m in Cairo now and I can tell you that the newspapers and commentators here gobble up what Democrats are saying about this war as further proof for their own conspiracy that the war to topple a former American client was the result of an Israeli intelligence operation.

It is never easy to take on your friends. But at this moment your country needs your political gifts. And while they don’t yet know it, so does your party.