Much has been made of John Murtha's recent advocation of some kind of pullout of troops from Iraq. I have a couple of gut reactions and a thought.
The first gut reaction came when I saw that he is something like a 16 term congressman. Who the hell gets to be an incumbent for 16 terms? I'm not kidding. Check this out from his website:
He had a long and distinguished 37-year career in the U.S. Marine Corps, retiring from the Marine Corps Reserve as a colonel in 1990; and he has been serving the people of the 12th Congressional District since 1974, one of only 131 people in the nation's history to have served more than 30 years in the U.S. House of Representatives and one of only 224 Members of Congress who have served 30 or more years.
Where's Newt Gingrich when you need him? Now clearly the guy must be loved in rural Western Pennsylvania and nothing short of a cardiac arrest is going to unseat him, but damn! My gut reaction is that you cannot be somebody so anonymous for 30 years unless you are a study in mediocrity. In other words, this outburst is probably the most controversial thing he's ever done in his career, which takes me to my second gut reaction.
It turns out that Murtha advocated a pullout from Mogadishu back in the day. So he's a Marine Colonel and no doubt he 'supports the troops' and is probably operating, given the above, from a non-aggressive standpoint. In other words, there's nothing he sees in this mission worth another soldier dying. That is rightly called a conservative attitude, or hedging. Now I'd say there's a huge difference between being a master at congressional pork wrangling & defense appropriations and being a military strategist. My gut tells me that this is the kind of congressman who'd rather invest in armored troop transports for the GIs than more Blackhawk helos. In other words, this guy is Defense, not Offense.
It is not without a sense of irony that I recognize that somebody who is bent on saving lives rather than expending them in combat wants to abandon Iraqis and leave them defenseless. Anything that is fatiguing and killing our GIs in Iraq is going to rock the world of the Iraqis without us.
Murtha's an old coot who has gotten a bit too plump. Thirty years inside the beltway getting pork for defense spending in Western Pennsylvania does not, a military strategist make. I think he's lost his edge, if he ever had it. Soldiers die. They live to fight and die if necessary, and it's something I think Murtha has forgotten. They do so others who can't defend themselves don't have to. That's their job. I don't buy his patriotic, ex-military cred on this one. Sparing the military the light pain it is suffering in Iraq is ignoble at best.
Hey old soldier, please fade away.
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