Murtha: Vast Majority of U.S. Troops Will Be Out Of Iraq By Year’s End
It’s obvious that John Murtha can’t get enough of the spotlight. Now he’s recorded an interview with Mike Wallace for Sunday night’s Sixty Minutes. Here’s some of Murtha’s predictions:
“I think the vast majority will be out by the end of the year and I’m hopeful it will be sooner than that,” Murtha tells Wallace, in the 60 MINUTES interview.
“You’re going to see a plan for withdrawal,” says Murtha, which he believes Congress will pass because of mounting pressure from constituents tired of the war that could affect the upcoming midterm elections. The political situation will force President Bush to accede to Congress, he says.
“I think the political people who give [the president] advice will say to him, ‘You don’t want a Democratic Congress. You want to keep a Republican majority, and the only way you’re going to keep it is by reducing substantially the troops in Iraq,’” Murtha says.
There’s just one major flaw with Murtha’s logic: If it’s apparent that he’s abandoned the Iraqi people, the GOP base will abandon him in droves. Unlike Democrats, Republicans take national security seriously. It’s also obvious that President Bush can win this issue anytime he wants simply by giving high profile speeches like he did in late November and early December.
Something else that Murtha hasn’t considered is that Democrats aren’t taken seriously when it comes to national security because they’ve got such a tarnished record when it comes to protecting America from global terrorists. Democrats still think that they’re winning the issue on NSA wiretapping. They aren’t. They’re losing that badly but still they persist on pressing their case.
Democrats also will suffer on this front when the RNC or other conservative organization puts together a commercial with Howard Dean’s “We can’t win” quote, Murtha’s “immediate withdrawal” quote and Harry Reid’s “We just killed the Patriot Act” quote. After all that, Republicans will be on the offensive bigtime.
“The insurgents are Iraqis, 93 percent of the insurgents are Iraqis. A very small percentage are foreign fighters…Once we’re out of there, [Iraqis] will eliminate [foreign fighters],” says Murtha.
What a dipstick. All of the insurgents are Iraqis, not 93%. Further, Murtha’s analysis of the situation on the ground is refuted by some great reporting by Dexter Filkins and Sabrina Tavernise in the NY Times.
According to their reporting, insurgents are now fighting against AQ terrorists in many parts of Iraq and aren’t focusing nearly the same amount of attention on American and Coalition troops as they did a couple years ago. That’s the fact and Murtha’s ignoring it because his agenda would fall apart if he acknowledged it.
“[President Bush] is trying to fight this war with rhetoric. Iraq is not where the center of terrorism is,” he says. “We’re inciting terrorism there….We’re destabilizing the area by being over there because we’re the targets,” Murtha tells Wallace.
Actually, Murtha’s lying when he accuses the President of “trying to fight this war with rhetoric.” Then again, he’s likely been too busy scheduling his daily diatribes to pay attention to the lengthy, detailed plan on the White House’s website.
It seems that I know more about President Bush’s victory plan than Murtha. Sadly, that isn’t surprising.
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing