California Conservative

I wish I’d seen the exchange between John Murtha and Don Rumsfeld. Instead, I get to only read about a portion of it. Here’s the key exchange:

“Where I disagree is fighting terrorism in Iraq,” Mr. Murtha said. “I think that we’re inciting terrorism, and that’s my personal opinion…When you go in…with the tactics we have to use to protect American lives, you’re going to create enemies. And that’s what we’ve done. I just think that we need to withdraw, redeploy as quickly as possible, and then, in addition to that, we need to continue the fight on terrorism,” he said. Mr. Murtha listed various polls that he said show that Iraqis want the U.S. out and approve of attacks on Americans. More than 2,000 U.S. service members have been killed in Iraq amid waves of violence that also have killed thousands of innocent Iraqis.
Mr. Rumsfeld listened as Mr. Murtha leveled his pessimistic assessment and then heard a second round of attacks from Rep. David R. Obey, (D-WI). The defense secretary then suspended his rehearsed opening statement and responded. “The idea that you should paint a picture and hang crepe over it, that everything’s horrible in Iraq, is not true,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, citing three elections last year that created an Iraqi constitution and parliament.
“Now, is it a pretty picture? Has it been done instantaneously? No. Is there a lot of tugging and hauling and politicking? You bet there is over there,” he said. “And are we gong to end up with something that we stand back and look at it and say, ‘Gee, that’s a pretty picture?’ No. It’s going to be an Iraqi picture. It’s not going to be an American picture. But it’s going to get done.” The Bush administration has admitted that its prewar planning failed to predict a foreign and homegrown insurgency.

As I’ve said on this blog before, Murtha doesn’t have a clue on what’s going on over there. Either that or he’s lying just to make waves against the Bush administration. Either way, Murtha’s statements aren’t rooted in reality.

I wish Secretary Rumsfeld would’ve spent more time from Thanksgiving through Christmas slapping down Murtha’s statements, although President Bush was doing an effective job pounding Democrats on the issue with his series of speeches across the nation and his Sunday night speech from the White House and the Monday morning press conference.

Mr. Obey revived Democratic attacks on poor prewar planning. “Let me simply express my deep and profound reservations about what’s happening in Iraq and my deep skepticism that this administration has a clue about what to do about it,” Mr. Obey said. “Given all the faulty intelligence, the poor planning, the misjudgments, the mismanagement that we’ve seen in this effort over the past number of years, why should we believe that the administration’s plan for Iraq is any more likely to produce success than the plan offered by Mr. Murtha?” he asked.
Mr. Rumsfeld tried to impress on lawmakers the challenge of turning a police state into a democracy while in the cross hairs of relentless al Qaeda and Iraqi terrorists. “When we get up in the morning, there’s no road map how to do this,” he said. “There’s no guidebook that says, ‘Gee, today you do this.’ It is tough stuff.”

Mr. Obey obviously isn’t real bright. If he were, he’d realize that you can’t win a war if you’ve abandoned the country before the job is finished. ANY PLAN would be better than Murtha’s. By a long shot.

Cross-post at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2006 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Iraq, Liberals, Military. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.