Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) continues to tarnish a heroic military career with a “policy” for Iraq that is makes Murtha look utterly disconnected from reality. First of all, military blogger Blackfive catches Murtha arguing for Clinton’s failed policies in Somalia as a model for how things could be done. It was after the “Black Hawk Down” incident in Mogadishu that bin Laden started to believe that the US was little more than a paper tiger. There was very little about the US engagement in Somalia that wasn’t disastrous – the only exception being the heroism of our troops when faced with such a dire situation.
Next, Jeff Goldstein finds Murtha arguing that his much-vaunted “rapid reaction force” that would be deployed “over the horizon” would be deployed way “over the horizon” – on the Japanese island of Okinawa. When asked by Tim Russert to explain this bizarre statement, Murtha responded:
REP. MURTHA: Well, it—you know, they—when I say Okinawa, I, I’m saying troops in Okinawa. When I say a timely response, you know, our fighters can fly from Okinawa very quickly. And—and—when they don’t know we’re coming. There’s no question about it. And, and where those airplanes won’t—came from I can’t tell you, but, but I’ll tell you one thing, it doesn’t take very long for them to get in with cruise missiles or with, with fighter aircraft or, or attack aircraft, it doesn’t take any time at all. So we, we have done—this one particular operation, to say that that couldn’t have done, done—it was done from the outside, for heaven’s sakes.
First of all, someone as ostensibly knowledgeable as Murtha should know that the Area of Operations in Iraq is controlled by the US Central Command (CENTCOM). Okinawa is not part of CENTCOM’s command structure – it’s part of the US Army Pacific Command (USPACOM). There’d be the little matter of having a completely unrelated command structure dealing with a situation 12,000 miles away. CENTCOM works out of Baghdad and Qatar, which is a little closer to the action.
Secondly, Murtha seems to have absolutely no understanding of the type of war we’re in. Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups use tactics that make cruise missile attacks and high-altitude bombing more than a little inappropriate. For one, you can’t get intelligence on the ground when you’re at 30,000 feet. If a group of terrorists attack an Iraqi police station, what the hell would Murtha have us do? Bomb the police station into rubble from an F-16? What do you do with a group of terrorists that routinely uses civilians as human shields when your choice of weapons are limited by air power? Just kill them all?
I seriously have my doubts whether Rep. Murtha is mentally fit for office based on these comments. No one with even an inkling of military knowledge – and Murtha can hardly be accused of that – would see his plan as anything near to viable. Either Murtha is just using this as a shameful cover for retreating and letting Iraq go to hell or alternately has confused real life with Star Trek. We can’t just beam bad guys into space or shoot death rays at terrorists from high altitude. This is a war based on counterinsurgency, which requires boots on the ground, ears to the walls, and close operational relationships with local officials. None of those things can be done when your troops are in Okinawa – or even Qatar.
Either Murtha has lost his grip on reality or he’s being shamelessly partisan. Either way, it reflects badly on someone who at one point served his country with distinctions. Murtha should know better, which makes his comments all the more inappropriate and inadvisable.
UPDATE: Murtha’s challenger, Diana Irey is getting some traction based on Murtha’s slide – as well she should. Murtha has served in Congress for 32 years, and diapers and Congressmen should be changed often – and for the same reason.
UPDATE: Froggy over at Blackfive draws Murtha a nice little map. To get from Okinawa to Iraq directly requires flying over Chinese and Iranian airspace, and would require no less than 6 mid-air refuelings for an F-16 to make the journey – one way. It’s pretty clear that either Murtha’s plan and reality are at odds with each other.
“Secondly, Murtha seems to have absolutely no understanding of the type of war we’re in. ”
Good thing Jay Reding does……from that front-row vantage point he has in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Typical – if you can’t respond with something of substance, just make an asinine ad hominem. Given that I rather doubt you could find three cities in Iraq on an unlabeled map, I wouldn’t be judging so harshly if I were in your shoes.
According to you, all I’d need is a map of Minnesota to find Fallujah….definitely a campaign theme I encourage Mark Kennedy to run on.
And where exactly is the “traction” you’re referring to Diana Irey as possessing?
Redding’s knocking a Congressman’s exit plan when he should be questioning Bush’s plan, which is
1. Stay the course until 2009
2. Let a Democratic President clean up my mess.
3. In 2012, blame the clean-up on the Democrats.
I’m with Murtha. This war is a pile of crap that stinks more each day.
My favorite part of the debate was when Congressman Gomer actually thanked our Lord and God that a decorated American Marine was not making decisions in World War II. On the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Having never served in the military himself.
Shameless.
If that decorated Marine was John Murtha, we’d all be speaking German right now. Except for the Jews – they wouldn’t be alive to speak.
What Murtha did 40 years ago was honorable. What he is doing today is shameful. Past heroism doesn’t excuse present cowardice.
Yes, how dare a civilian speak out on military matters! What do people think this is, a republic?!
Jay:
If people like you were making decisions we’d still be losing soldiers in Vietnam, “staying the course.” And we would have entered WWII in 1937 and come out as crippled as the other countries in Europe and not the economic powerhouse we are today.
Cowardice is hiding behind a failed war policy and letting other people’s sons and daughters take the bullets.
Again, this is why people with a profound ignorance of military history keep embarrassing themselves. By the end of the Vietnam War, the North was unable to attack the South. It wasn’t until 1975 – three years later – that the North finally regained enough strength to attack the South. Had the US not shamefully refused to provide air cover during that offensive, South Vietnam would not have fallen.
There would have been no fall of Saigon.
No massacres in Cambodia.
No boat people.
No reeducation camps.
Millions of people who were executed by the Communist regime would not have been murdered in cold blood.
Sounds like that would have been the better option rather than the shameful betrayal of our former allies.
Again, you have no conception of history. Had Chamberlain not sold out the Czechs to the Third Reich, the Nazi war machine would have been stuck in Czechoslovakia for at least a year.
The blitzkrieg against Poland would have not happened – or happened much later. Millions of lives could have been saved – there’s a much stronger possibility that World War Two would have never happened.
That’s why people with such a profound ignorance of history have no business potificating on current events – as Satanaya wrote, those who fail to learn from history are damned to repeat it.
We have a professional military. We are a republic, not a military dictatorship. Every citizen has a right to speak out on military matters and foreign affairs, and if you don’t like it there are plenty of states in which only the military has political power. I hear Pyongyang is quite nice this time of year…
The funny thing about you conservatives is that when people disagee you just go around thinking your stuff doesn’t stink. Then you insult the other person. Pretty soon you’ll be running around whining about how nasty and spiteful and hateful those Democrats are. Seriously, I wasn’t aware that a little civility was so hard for you.
I really have no interest in debating Vietnam with someone who thinks we should still be there, that American forces were what was stopping executions and instability in Cambodia (although people in Laos were doing just fine with the massacre thing while our troops were there and the instability in Cambodia was certainly fueled in the beginning by a resentment of American forces in the region–sound familiar?), or that American air support would have been enough to halt the March-April 1975 offensive.
Similarly, I don’t have much patience for someone who thinks that a British hard line in 1937 would have halted World War II. Chamberlain was a far cry from competent, but to think that Chamberlain could have stopped WWII as late as 1937 is an interesting theory to which I simply do not subscribe. If I were using your language, I would say you are embarrassing yourself and you have no conception of history.
That said, you don’t seem to get the point, which is that you hawks just don’t get it. You’re all well and good with someone else’s children fighting wars. As long as it’s not you or yours, we’ll put troops anywhere and fight any war, any time.
Truth is always the easiest defense against libel.
Then you obviously don’t want to think critically about history. From 1968-1972 the South Vietnamese didn’t lose a single engagement with the North. Despite the US pullout in 1973, the South didn’t fall for another two years – and it only fell because we offered them no support. Nor am I the only one to make that argument.
Given that none other than Sir Winston Churchill said the same, I’m hardly bothered by your condescension. As historian Williamson Murray stated:
The bloodless capture of the Skoda tank works greatly increased the military capability of the Third Reich. The raw resources gained through Chamberlain’s surrender at Munich greatly prolonged the suffering of the war.
And you don’t get it: in a democracy everyone has the inalienable right to defend or decry a war regardless of their service. If I can’t speak out for this war because I haven’t served, then anyone who hasn’t served has no right to speak out on war – presumably including you.
The argument that only the military or former military has a right to support and defend a war is an argument utterly incompatible with democratic, civilian control of the military. This nation is a democracy, and the “chickenhawk” argument is an argument only made with a fatal combination of ignorance and malice.
Again, I would say Vietnam was not worth 100,000 more American lives. We disagree.
Again, WWII was set in place at the end of WWI and there were so many issues that went unresolved throughout Europe that by 1937 Chamberlain could have said anything he wanted to without stopping the war.
Again, everyone can defend a war in a democracy. But the people who badly want to have the war should send some of their own to fight it.
Which makes the assumption that such an outcome would have happened. We had already left Vietnam by 1973. The South Vietnamese needed two things from us: money and air support. We did not provide those things. Had we done so, the Saigon government would not have fallen.
It wasn’t Chamberlain’s talk that exacerbated the war – it was his complicity in giving the Third Reich exactly what it needed to make blitzkrieg. Had Hitler had to fight for Czechoslovakia, it would have at the very least weakened the Nazi advance into the rest of Europe.
And again, here we have a deeply foolish argument: nobody sends their kids to fight in this country. Our soldiers are volunteers. They are professionals. The military is their career. We do not have, nor do we want, a military of conscripts. The argument that anyone should “send” their child to fight is completely wrong – they can choose that life for themselves.
Our job as citizens is to support them – and last I checked, trying to propagate enemy propaganda is hardly a valid way of going about it.
As most who attended the rally know, I was there. After the dust had cleared created by some moonbat among the bootmurtha crowd who called in a fake police report that a fight had broken out, Larry Bailey came out to speak with me.
I complimented him from the bottom of my heart for the contributions he has made to our country’s national security while he was serving active duty in the US Navy.
He made it clear my request to speak would not happen. He then proceeded to suggest he has no memory of the email he wrote me on 8/20/2006 2:59:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time stating that our current Commander in Chief made stupid mistakes in Iraq.
Larry then proceeded to illustrate stupid mistakes made in passed wars. After he mentioned 3 or 4 examples I interjected that there is a difference between those wars and this one.
In the past it took weeks, months, sometimes years for mistakes to be discovered and reported. Today is the information age where mistakes are reported within hours of their occurrence. I reminded him this war was still going on. I also reminded him of the glaring mistakes he had acknowledged President Bush had made in Iraq, and our respective use of the Internet to support our respective views and that is where our conversation ended.
I waited outside the Arena with a Johnstown police officer who had stayed behind after the bootmurtha hysterics caused 3 squad cars and a sergeant to arrive with sirens blaring. I was debating Steeler football with him when a motorcycle officer stopped by, who had been inside. When I asked how many were inside he said, “not many at all” When I asked “500?”, he responded, “na … well maybe 500, at most.”
At the end of the event when Larry Bailey came out for a photo op next to the bootmurtha.com sign on the sidewalk outside the War Memorial Arena. I handed Larry the speech I had waited to deliver. He put it in his outside left coat pocket.
This is my speech Larry Bailey has in his coat pocket … the words he was not man enough to let me say:
“Please join me in Prayer.
Heavily father we pray today for you to continue to protect the men and women of the armed forces of the United States and other countries who are in harms way in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries throughout the world. We thank them and their families for their sacrifices.
We pray for the souls of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in all wars. We pray for strength and courage for the POWs and MIAs and those held hostage.
We pray for protection and safety of relief workers helping those in need.
We pray for the protection of children and innocent civilians. Lord we especially pray for our nation and our leaders.”
.
Below you will find the press release that went out on October 29th of this year.
.
———————————————————————-
.
LARRY BAILEY (BOOTMURTHA.COM) OCTOBER 1ST RALLY IN JOHNSTOWN, PA.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Cliff Hancuff
September 29, 2006 (202) 247-1418
Journalismisflat@aol.com
“American troops could be home now, except for critical mistakes made by our current Commander in Chief,” charges Cliff Hancuff, Director of The World of Journalism Is Flat, Too.
“Media and right-wing bloggers are ignoring this fact. For weeks I have been challenging political activists and journalists to act with a minimum of ethical standards,” continued Hancuff.
“I became involved when the Sun-Sentinel in Florida reported that Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) said the U.S. poses the top threat to world peace. I watched in dismay as the media and bloggers worldwide reported on this misquote.”
“My involvement continued when I discovered Diana Irey, John Murtha’s political opponent, had attacked Murtha using a fictional quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln.”
“Larry Bailey of bootmurtha.com is continuing his three year blind support of our current Commander in Chief’s incompetence in war. President Bush declared war in Iraq without the 4th Infantry, our most lethal, modern, and deployable heavy division in the world,” added Hancuff.
This mistake lead to the atrocity of Al Qaqaa. Iraqi insurgents stole hundreds of tons of high explosives to be used as weaponry.
“These are the explosives being used by Iraqi insurgents and al Qaeda to perpetuate the war in Iraq.”
“I am distressed that the same issues ignored by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004 are being ignored again in 2006,” said Hancuff adding, “Americans, American soldiers, and their families deserve better.”
“Without these critical mistakes made by our current Commander in Chief, our American troops would be home with their loved ones, with honor, right now.”
On October 1, 2006 Hancuff be at the Cambria County War Memorial Arena located in Johnstown Pennsylvania for Larry Bailey’s Swiftboating of John Murtha rally. It is there Hancuff will continue his wait for Mr. Bailey to recall the values of honor and integrity taught him by our US Navy.
There is a youtube.com video online at:
YouTube – Rovian Architecture Unplugged
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5jcyHokFyE
The World of Journalism Is Flat, Too
(202) 247-1418
-30-