From the Weekly Standard "Scrapbook", 7/3/06.
"When we went to Beirut, I said to President Reagan, 'Get out.' Now, the other day we were doing a debate, and they said, 'Well Beirut was a different situation. We cut and run.' We didn't cut and run. President Reagan made the decision to change direction because he knew we couldn't win it. Even in Somalia, President Clinton made the decision, 'We have to, we have to change direction.'... We need to change direction. We can't win a war like this.... At some point you got to reassess it like Reagan did in Beirut, like Clinton did in Somalia. You just have to say, 'Okay, it's time to change direction.'"
--- Rep. John Murtha, unrging a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, "Meet the Press," June 18, 2006.
"We have seen in the last decade the decline of the American government and the weaknesses of the American soldier, who is ready to wage cold wars and unprepared to fight long wars. This was proven in Beirut when the Marines fled after two explosions. It also proves they can run in less than 24 hours, and this was also repeated in Somalia... After a few blows, [the Americans] ran in defeat.... They forgot about being the world leader and the leader of the new world order. [They] left, dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat."
--- Osama bin Laden, ABC News interview, May 28, 1998.
Anyone get the point yet? It was the very cases that Murtha points to as examples of "reassessment" and "changing direction" that led OBL to believe that we had become weak, and that we could be defeated on 9-11. And now Murtha wants us to make the same mistake again, which will only lead to more 9-11s.
And people wonder why I say that Murtha is anti-soldier. The actions that he is proposing are going to get more soldiers killed. The very fact that he is proposing them at all emboldens the enemy and is getting soldiers killed.
If Murtha really cared fo the soldiers, he'd shut the hell up and let them get on with the job of winning the war. But he doesn't. Instead he claims that they don't have the ability to win the war (despite the fact that they keep proving him wrong) and keeps accusing them of war crimes without any proof of what actually occured. THAT is anti-military, anti-soldier rhetorric, and it is endangering the troops.
Elliot |
