California Conservative

The good people at Newsmax are reminding us that Jack Murtha called for the American pullout of Somalia in 1993.

After terrorists attacked U.S. troops in Mogadishu, Somalia 12 years ago, anti-Iraq war Democrat, Rep. John Murtha urged then-President Clinton to begin a complete pullout of U.S. troops from the region. Clinton took the advice and ordered the withdrawal, a decision that Osama bin Laden would later credit with emboldening his terrorist fighters and encouraging him to mount further attacks against the U.S.
“Our welcome has been worn out,” Rep Murtha told NBC’s “Today” show in Sept. 1993, a month after 4 U.S. Military Police had been killed in Somalia by a remote-detonated land mine. The Pennsylvania Democrat announced that President Clinton had been “listening to our suggestions. And I think you’ll see him move those troops out very quickly.” Two weeks later, after 18 U.S. Rangers were killed in the battle of Mogadishu, Murtha visited U.S. forces in Somalia.

I’ve got to give Representative Murtha credit for the restraint he’s shown since advising President Clinton to pull out of Mogadishu. Back then, it only took him 8 months to suggest that we’d worn out our welcome. This time, it took him almost 3 years before advising this President that full-blown retreat was in order.

The good news is that this President has better advisers than President Clinton had. This also shows that Rep. Murtha isn’t as concerned with winning wars as he is with winning wars in the right political climate is intact. That isn’t leadership, people. Don’t mistake his policy proposals for leadership. I’d define them more as opinions or trial balloons than anything else.

The comments were eerily similar to Murtha’s assessment of U.S involvement in Iraq last week, when he declared, “the U.S. cannot accomplish anything further militarily. It is time to bring [the troops] home.” Taking Murtha’s advice back then, however, turned out to have deadly consequences for U.S. security.

To steal a Yogi Berra line, “it’s like deja vu all over again.” There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between his statements then and his statements now.

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Monday, November 21st, 2005 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, DNC, Foreign Policy, 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.