Mehdi Hasan Grills Pro-War Joe Lieberman on Iraq Casualties: ‘Are You Willing to Say Tonight It Was a Disaster?’

Mehdi Hasan interviewed former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) – yes, that Joe Lieberman – on his Peacock show Wednesday, and it went exactly as you’d expect.

Toward the end of the interview Hasan asked the former senator whether his hawkish position on the Iraq war had changed.

“Have you disowned it?” asked Hasan. “As recently as 2015, 2016, you were still saying you thought it was a good thing overall. It was a disaster. Are you willing to say tonight it was a disaster, you were wrong, you regret it, you apologize?”

Not surprisingly, Lieberman was not willing to say any of those things.

“Well, sorry to disappoint you,” said Lieberman, mildly chuckling. “I’m not. Look, I was in the majority of members of the Senate Democratic Caucus who voted to authorize President Bush to go to war in Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein. After the war, after Saddam went into hiding until we caught him, the Bush administration made some big mistakes And that went to the whole way in which they handled the Iraqi military, the Iraqi government. But my point of contention with my fellow Democrats who turned against the war then was that we can’t just cut funding for our troops in battle, which is what a couple of Democrats tried to do.

Lieberman claimed the U.S. was able to “stabilize” Iraq.

“Thousands of Iraqis died. Innocent men, women, children, civilians, in U.S. air strikes, in massacres, in places like Haditha and Mahmudiyah,” retorted Hasan. “Does none of that bother you? Doesn’t affect your conscience? Doesn’t keep you up at night?”

“Sure it does,” replied Lieberman.

“The sheer level of suffering that we caused in Iraq?” continued Hasan.

“Of course it does,” said Lieberman. “But the truth is that the people of Iraq were suffering terribly under Saddam Hussein and so were the people of the region. I think the world is safer.”

The former senator said the cost of the war in terms of lives and money was “way beyond what I ever anticipated. So, I supposed if you could’ve foreseen that, I might’ve felt differently about it. But I’m not gonna go back and  try to–”

“I would hope that if you had foreseen thousands of deaths, you would’ve thought differently about it,” Hasan interjected. “We’ll have to leave it there.”

Watch above via Peacock.