I know Thomas Ricks has gotten a lot of criticism from various bloggers for perceived inconsistencies between what his book says and what he wrote back in the day for The Washington Post, but Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq is a really great book. I've been looking for a good pretext to quote the heartbreaking passage about Max Cleland on pages 63-64 and Cleland's trip to Connecticut on behalf of Joe Lieberman seems as good a pretext as any:

One of those voting for it was a successor to Sam Nunn as a Georgia Democrat: Max Cleland, who was in a tight campaign for reelection in which his challenger, Saxby Chambliss, was running commercials that showed images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and implied that Cleland wasn't standing up to them. Despite his misgivings, Cleland felt under intense political pressure to go with the administration. "It was obvious that if I voted against the resolution that I would be dead meat in the race, just handing them a victory," he said in 2005. Even so, he now considers his prowar choice "the worst vote I cast."

Waiting to vote, Cleland looked over and saw Byrd, who had been in the Senate for forty-four years. "I knew he had been through the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. I knew he wanted me to show some political courage."

Cleland's name was called. "Aye," he said. He glanced again at Byrd who, he recalled, "got up and walked away."

Despite his vote for the war, the next month Cleland lost his Senate race by a margin of 53 percent to 46 percent, in part because of a statewide controversy over the Confederate battle flag that helped get out the rural white vote. He said he took it harder than being blown up by a hand grenade in Vietnam. "I went down -- physically, mentally, emotionally -- down into the deepest, darkest hole of my life," he recalled. "I had several moments when I just didn't want to live."

He began attending group therapy sessions every Tuesday afternoon at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in northwest Washington, DC, where he had been medically retired from the military on Christmas Eve 1968. "I wound up back at Walter Reed! I look down the hall, and it's like Salvador Dali is painting my llife. Thirty-seven years later, and i have another president creating a Vietnam. Kids are dying, getting blown up -- that's me." Sitting in his office overlooking Farragut Square in downtown Washington long after the start of the war, he propped himself sideways in his armchair, pushing the stump of his right arm into the side of the chair. "I see these young Iraq veterans, missing legs and arms and eyes. They are so brave. They have no idea what is down the road for them."

He certainly doesn't sound very much like Joe Lieberman.