Congressman Jack Murtha, as old and experienced in Vietnam as he is, shows he hasn't learned much in today's war on terrorism. After weeks of saying he has been taken out of context by his cut and run ideas, he continues to say, on Face The Nation today, that we can't win in Iraq, that our troops are not being properly supplied, that we, our forces have become the enemy. All of which contradicts the elections that have taken place and a third election coming up next week, which is part of the plan to get out of Iraq. You can't take what he said out of context when he repeats it over and over again.
While our soldiers and Iraqi soldiers are patrolling neighborhoods chasing down terrorists, trying to prevent the roadside bombers from disrupting the creation of a representative government in Iraq, Murtha's plan to pull back to a supposed safer rear position, then go in when needed, is a recipe for failure. It reminds me of the lesson learned in Afghanistan when the coalition was thought to be close to capturing bin Laden and Mullah Omar, and a temporary cease-fire was put in place, supposedly to begin a surrender. The same mistake was made in Fallujah when they were trying to get Al-Zarkowi . Lessons learned by everyone but Murtha on this tactic is that the enemy uses the cease fire to escape and to re-group to fight another day. Exactly what will happen if our troops were to re-deploy to a position away from the action.
Meanwhile, Jack Murtha continues to supply aid and comfort to our enemy who, you can be sure, hope that Murtha's ideas will come to fruition before Bush's plan finishes it for the long term.
Missing in Murtha's world is the effect that his rhetoric has on the people of Iraq. The 27 million of them, not the few thousand terrorists. That America cannot be trusted as an ally is what Murtha's plan exhibits. The Iraqi people trusted us once to protect them from Saddam if they showed the will to be free, and we let them down. The result of that was Saddam used mass graves to punish those who supported coalition forces in the first Iraq war in Kuwait. Murtha might be too old to remember that, but I'm sure the Iraqi people have not forgotten. I'm sure the Iraqi people feel that Murtha is on the wrong side of this war, like I do.
For Murtha, Pelosi, Reid, Kennedy, Durbin, Rockefeller, Byrd, and a host of other characters wearing the commander-in-chief costume, the American people need to tell them at the ballot box that this and any other war is best won when there is one voice behind the effort. Their efforts to politicize everything about the war has made the entire effort more costly in any way measurable and our job of winning it that much more difficult.
10:46:50 AM 
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