House Democrat calls for immediate troop withdrawal

Oh c'mon Hayes you know that our bases in Germany and Japan don't represent an occupation because they haven't had any police duties or other duties to support the government from internal insurrection unlike Iraq where our forces are the police and the force protecting the government from an internal insurgency. The attacks on US soldiers in the 80's was an attack on a disco by foreign terrorists looking to get Americans yes but they weren't insurgents because they weren't looking to overthrow the German government.

But since you bring this up then do you also believe that Federal bases in former Confederate states represents a continuance of the occupation from Reconstruction?

 

This is a very good take from Cragg Hines of the Houston Chronicle. So, is the Chronicle a liberal rag now??


Nov. 22, 2005, 10:21PM

So let's talk turkey about just where we are on Iraq

By CRAGG HINES
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

If the question already is or ever becomes, "Who lost Iraq?" the answer is not Jack Murtha.

Nor Howard Dean. Nor John McCain. Nor Eric Shinseki. Nor even that pair of Euro-calculators, Jacques Chirac or Gerhard Schroeder.

George W. Bush will have had to manage that, with a little help from Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice and a cast of go-along supporters.

And if Iraq happens to be "won" (just try defining that in relation to our current Babylonian bamboozlement), then as Brent Scowcroft has asked, "At what cost?"

So is it no-win? Sort of looks like it. This is not a reflection on anyone's military sacrifice or on anyone's (including my own) gullibility regarding weapons of mass destruction.

This is an assessment of the best-case scenario of what we can see about a year down the road, even if Dec. 15 elections in Iraq are modestly successful and a government creaks along under a problematic constitution and holds things together short of an all-out civil war.

The worst-case scenario is a civil war that draws in Iran, Syria and Turkey. Then we'd find that U.S. efforts, by removing Saddam Hussein (as satisfying as that may have been), have only accentuated the geopolitical power vacuum that was a principal reason that George H.W. Bush (and Scowcroft) opted not to hound retreating Iraqis up the Highway of Death in 1991.

And who would most recently have set the stage for Iraq to be a nasty little terrorist breeding ground? Well, let's just say he'll be spending his Thanksgiving holiday in McLennan County.

The question of medium-range scenarios is at the heart of the debate ignited last week by a speech by Rep. John P. Murtha, D-Pa. If you have not read it in its entirety, do so. It's on Murtha's House Web site at http://www.house.gov/murtha. In tone and preparation, the speech is, if anything, restrained.

What's interesting — and little done in the wake of various mischaracterizations of Murtha's speech — is to compare his proposal to what the White House plans. At least as manifested by the apparent intent of Central Command, Bush seems to have in mind the beginning of a significant drawdown of U.S. forces from Iraq by spring.

This is the signal the White House is sending to calm political allies looking ahead to the 2006 midterm elections. "We're going to be on our way out of Iraq," Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said Tuesday when asked how the war will figure in 2006 voting.

Once the pullout begins, the only difference between Murtha and Bush is pace, positioning and the old troop-level argument.

On that point, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., among others, continues to contend that there have never been enough boots on the ground. That's the sort of observation that got Gen. John Shenseki fired, so no wonder the remaining brass doesn't clamor publicly for more personnel.

Murtha, a decorated (including two Purple Hearts) Marine from the Vietnam era, probably has contacts throughout (repeat, throughout) the nation's military establishment that are as good as any in Washington.

For his efforts, Murtha was initially vilified in the crudest manner. Republicans, anxious for what they thought would be a quick political kill, ran to the House floor with a jack-leg version of Murtha's proposal.

Republicans' performance on a procedural point played so poorly that by the time of the real debate on the leadership's phony immediate-withdrawal resolution, the GOP allowed only more seasoned members near microphones on the floor.

If you didn't get the full picture, you could listen to President Bush in China, bringing up on his own that "people should feel comfortable about expressing their opinions about Iraq." Maybe any discomfort stemmed from his earlier agreement with Cheney that war critics were "reprehensible."

In doing his own one-man version Monday of a good cop-bad cop routine on critics of the Iraqi operation, Cheney seemed to be competing for the most ludicrous non-sequitur award.

Try this gem from his speech at the American Enterprise Institute: "Some have suggested that by liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein we simply stirred up a hornet's nest. They overlook a fundamental fact: We were not in Iraq on Sept. 11, 2001, and the terrorists hit us anyway."

Nor were there in Iraq, on Sept. 11, 2001, significant, if any, elements of the group responsible for the attacks on the United States. Now, unfortunately, there are plenty.

By the vice president's reasoning, and using the motivational background of the Sept. 11 hijackers as a guide, the United States should have been carpet bombing hateful madrassas in Saudi Arabia about 15 years ago.

Now that would be a good, nonreprehensible point to debate.

Hines is a Houston Chronicle columnist based in Washington, D.C. (cragg.hines@chron.com)

HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com


It's amazing to me how the country is suddenly going away from the Republican Party on this issue, and many others. Apparently, we reached that "tipping point," and burst right on through to new territory. The Bush Administration and the Republican Leadership have to be just freakin' out, man. Groovy!



Keep D&D Civil.

 

Murtha came out of this better than almost anyone. Bush called him a "a good man who served our country with honor and distinction as a Marine in Vietnam and as a United States congressman." Cheney called him a "good man, a Marine, a patriot." That idiotic Ohio congresswoman had to apologize twice to him. People now know his name and are taking what he says much more seriously.

 

Hence the administration and military all of the sudden putting up trial balloons of bringing troops home over the last 48 hours.

Murtha did that.

 

Here's a nice column from Bruce Morton of CNN. I can certainly relate to it.


Ugly times

Congress is more about personal attacks than debating ideas

By Bruce Morton
CNN National Correspondent


You've probably noticed that President Bush is in trouble in the polls -- an approval rating of just 37 percent in the latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll, the lowest of his presidency. You may not have noticed that the voters give Congress even worse marks, just 32 percent in that same poll.

There are good reasons for that. One probably is that just about everything in Congress these days is personal, partisan and ugly.

For instance, last week Democratic Rep. John Murtha, a Marine Corps veteran from Pennsylvania, made a speech saying it was time for the U.S. to pull its troops out of Iraq. He may be right or wrong about that, but the debate wasn't about his idea; it was about him.

Rep. Jean Schmidt of Ohio, the newest member -- she's the Republican who beat an anti-war Democrat who'd served in Iraq -- told the House she had a message from a Marine Corps reservist in her district. "He... asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message: that cowards cut and run. Marines never do."

Murtha, of course, is a Vietnam vet with two Purple hearts, the V for valor, the whole nine yards. Massachusetts Democrat Martin Meehan yelled at the Republicans, "You guys are pathetic!" Democrat Harold Ford of Tennessee charged toward the Republicans, shouting, "Say Murtha's name!" Colleagues held him back.

Schmidt finally said, "My words were not directed at any member of the House," though of course they were, and asked that they be withdrawn from the record.

'Like fifth graders in school playground'
This is debate? In a legislature? It's more like fifth graders in the school playground, yelling things like, "Your mother wears combat boots."

Congress was not always like this. I'm old enough to remember debates about Vietnam, a day when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suddenly turned on Secretary of State Dean Rusk with tough, skeptical questions. Or a day in the Senate chamber when George McGovern, later the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972, shouted, "This chamber reeks of blood!"

But he was still talking about the issue, about the war, not questioning someone's character. And of course you don't have to be brave, or cowardly, to think that this war, or that one, was a bad idea.

The last time public debate was this vulgar was probably during the anti-communist fever that gripped the country after World War II. Anyone who disagreed with you about anything was a communist or a communist sympathizer -- "comsimp" is the ugly word we heard so often back then.

And it isn't just Iraq. A multibillion-dollar spending bill included some 6,000 pet projects for members' districts, including a $223 million "Bridge to Nowhere," from Ketchikan, Alaska, population 7,423, to Gravina Island, population 50. It would replace a ferry. That earmark was canceled, they say, but not really. Alaska still gets the money and can do whatever it wants with it -- including building a bridge. Alaska's delegation is so senior it ranks third in total federal funding, behind California and Illinois, which have lots more people.

This is caring legislation? John Kennedy urged Americans, presumably including congressmen, to ask what they could do for their country. That's out. Providing pork for your district is in.

There is one proposal that might help, at least in the House. For the last 10 or 15 years, both parties have drawn district lines in the states to create safe seats. That tends to produce fewer centrists -- more left-wing Democrats and right-wing Republicans -- and fewer independent thinkers, more members who are supposed to take orders from their leaders. A couple of states -- Iowa is one -- have the district lines drawn, not by the parties, but by an independent board -- retired judges. Similar proposals were on the ballot in California and Ohio this fall, but lost in both states.

So it's pork, and partisanship and personal attacks. The issue that provokes the hottest language, of course, is the war in Iraq. It's starting to get to them. Republican Sen. Jim DeMint (South Carolina), told the Washington Post, "I feel like every morning I wake up, get a concrete block, and have to walk around with it all day. We can't even address the issues."

He's got that about right.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/11/22/morton.polls/index.html

 

On Today Show, O’Reilly Compares Murtha With Hitler Sympathizers

Bill O’Reilly on the Today Show this morning:

 

basso... "crushing dissent."



Keep D&D Civil

 

decent crusher

 

Murtha Responds to Bush Speech
MURTHA: Let me start by going through a timeline and then get to what the president said.

In May 1, 2003, the president declared it was a major -- end of major operations. Then he sent John Hamre to Iraq. John Hamre was undersecretary of defense in the Clinton administration. And he found all kinds of problems. He said: You got three months, three critical months to get this thing under control if you want to control the security; 12 months at the most, but three months are crucial, the first three months.

He said small things like sewage and water and things that a lot of people don't pay attention to -- I pay attention, because in my district that's important. But a lot of people paid no attention to that report.

MURTHA: I went there -- now this was July that Hamre made his report and it was a very prescient report. I mean, it was a very accurate report about the predictions of what was going to happen. And we have a copy of it here for you.

In August 16th, I went to Iraq, from August 16th to the 20th. When I came back, I said to Secretary Rumsfeld: We require immediate attention of body armor. They said they were prepared. They said they had what they needed.

Forty thousand troops didn't have body armor. They needed armored Humvees. They needed jammers and Kevlar blankets they asked for. This was all levels of people in Iraq at the time.

And then I wrote to the president on September 4th and I said, "I believe you have miscalculated the magnitude of the effort we are facing. We should energize, Iraqitize and internationalize this effort."

And we have copies of that letter in there.

Then we had the $87 billion supplemental in October of 2003.

I said on the floor that I felt the most important part of that supplemental was the construction money. A lot of people voted against it because they didn't think we should be spending money in Iraq for construction when Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary Wolfowitz, had said: It's going to be paid for by oil money.

So a lot of people opposed it on the floor, but it passed handily.

Then I went back to Iraq and I told Ambassador Bremer, General Sanchez and General Odierno and the young general that was their public relations guy, "You guys are way too optimistic about this."

MURTHA: "You're not being honest with the American people."

They took umbrage. I got some nasty letters, as I usually do when I say something like this.

Now, you remember, I wrote to the president in September 4th of 2003. I got a letter back in April 6th, 2004. The president didn't write back. I received a response from a deputy undersecretary -- paints a totally rosy, unrealistic picture, saying 200,000 Iraqis -- now, hear what I'm saying -- 200,000 Iraqis under arms, reconstruction projects and 70 percent of Iraqis feel -- or 2,200 reconstruction projects -- 70 percent of Iraqis feel life is good.

The irony is that this was the month with the most U.S. deaths; 137 were killed. But that's what they wrote to me.

Then we have Abu Ghraib that very year.

Now I said to the secretary of defense: You have got a shortage of people in specialty, MOS specialties, that's a military specialist. We had truck drivers who couldn't back up a truck. We had security guards who weren't trained in security at all. We had National Guard security people without radios -- couldn't talk to the front, the back of the convoy, endangering their lives.

We got radios over there and we tried to address this very problem. And we had a press conference. Nancy Pelosi and I did. We said, "the military's overstretched and there's poor planning." And I said at that time I did not think we could win this militarily.

I got a lot of criticism. DeLay got up on the floor and said I was a traitor. What I said to him, publicly, I won't tell you.

Now, here's the way I measure progress. The president said we got slow progress. We want to help the government of Iraq -- this is the State Department -- provide essential services, crude oil production.

MURTHA: Now, the green line you see here is the goal -- and they got charts here that you can get copies of. This is what we actually had in oil production.

Now, you remember, Secretary Wolfowitz said, we're going to have oil -- going to pay for this. And this is all we've gotten. We didn't get up to prewar level in oil production.

Today they said we're making progress.

I can only measure progress by what I see and the things that I can actually measure, not by what they say are brigades and so forth and so on.

Now, water production: We put $2.1 billion into water production. They're short of water all over the country. And they have only spent $581 billion -- or $581 million.

Now, that's why Hamre's report was so important. You had to get this insurgency under control immediately. You had to win the hearts and minds of the people. That's the key in a guerrilla-type war.

This is electricity overview. This is the demand. The yellow line is the demand. The red line is the prewar level. And you can see that occasionally you got up to prewar level. That's the way I measure progress.

Now, there's one other area where I measure progress, and that's incidents. Incidents have increased fivefold in the period of time that -- well, a year ago. A year ago there were five times less than today.

And at Abu Ghraib -- now, again, we didn't have the right people in the right kind of specialties. We didn't have them trained. So at Abu Ghraib, we had people untrained that were taking care of prisoners. And you see the result of that.

The secretary offered to resign at that time. I would have accepted his resignation, because I think this was a Defense Department responsibility. And we had many other (inaudible).

Right now, GAO says in a report of November -- November? -- November -- we have 112,000 shortages in critical MOSs. Now, what are those shortages?

MURTHA: Number one, they're in demolition experts; number two, special forces people; number three, intelligence experts, which are absolutely essential; and fourth is translators.

Now could there be any more important specialties than that? And we're short in every one of those fields.

And you know what? We're paying someone to go into the Army. When I was in, they paid $72 a day. I volunteered in the middle of the Korean War. They are now paying $150,000 for somebody that's in special forces, in one of the specialties, in order to get them to re- enlist.

They missed their goal. And one of the biggest reasons that I'm so concerned about this -- and I talk to the military all the time -- is the future of the military. They missed their goal in recruiting by 6,600 this last time.

But you have to look at that, because there's a retention, there's a stop-loss, plus the problem that we had with the people not in the right specialties. And they enlisted people in the higher levels who were probably going to enlist anyway that they wouldn't normally have re-enlisted.

They have lowered the standards. They're accepting 20 percent last year in category four. Now, this is a highly technical service we're dealing with, And yet they lowered the standards to category four, which they said when we had the volunteer army, that would eliminate all the category four.

Now, let me tell you the major problem we have. You heard the president talk today about terrorism. Every other word was "terrorism."

Let me separate terrorism from insurgency. When I was in Iraq in 1991, president -- or King Fahd said to me -- this was an early morning meeting, like two or three o'clock in the morning, when he normally met with people during the air war.

And he said: Get your troops out of Saudi Arabia the minute this war's over. You're on sacred ground. You're destabilizing the whole region. I reported that back to the State Department and, as you know, we didn't get our troops out of there. We left our troops there.

Bin Laden said he attacked the United States because of the troops in Saudi Arabia. That's terrorism. Terrorism was in London. Terrorism was in Spain. Terrorism was, obviously, in the United States.

MURTHA: That's completely separate from what's going on in Iraq. Iraq is an insurgency. At one of the hearings early on, Secretary Rumsfeld denied there was an insurgency. He said it was a gang of something or another. But they wouldn't admit that they were having real problems over there. They kept being unrealistic, illusionary about what was going on in Iraq.

One of the major problems we have in fighting an insurgency is the military and the way they fight. And I adhere to the way they fight. They send in massive force. They use artillery, they use air and mortars. And they kill a lot of people in order to suppress fire and protect our military. I'm for that.

But it doesn't make you any friends. That's part of the problem. For instance, in Fallujah, which happened about the same time -- the first Fallujah happened about the same time as Abu Ghraib -- we put 150,000 people outside their homes in Fallujah.

If you remember in Jordan, the bomber said that the reason she became a bomber was because two of her relatives were killed in Fallujah. We lost the hearts and minds of the people.

Hamre said: You've got three months to win the hearts and minds of the people, to get this under control, to get the looting and so forth under control.

We didn't do that. There's been poor planning from the start by the Defense Department. The Defense Department fought to keep this planning under their control. State Department had entirely different reasons for wanting it. And we even voted in the House to give it to the State Department.

And finally, in conference, we had to agree to let the president make the decision. He made the decision to give it to the Defense Department.

Now, in an insurgency and nation-building -- what did President Bush say when he ran for office the first time? "We are not into nation-building. And we're not into nation-building because of the way our military has to operate." It's that simple. We've got to go in and level the place, destroy a place. And when we destroy a place, we lose the very thing that's absolutely essential to winning the insurgency.

MURTHA: Now, let's talk about terrorism versus insurgency in Iraq itself. We think that foreign fighters are about 7 percent -- might be a little bit more, a little bit less. Very small proportion of the people that are involved in the insurgency are terrorists or how I would interpret them as terrorists.

And we don't have enough troops to guard against the border. The generals in charge of that part of Anbar said, "I don't have enough troops. They've given me a mission to protect against the Syrian border. I don't have enough troops to do that."

They have never had enough troops to get it under control. They didn't have enough troops for the looters. And they haven't had enough troops ever since then to get the place under control.

But the key elements, as I see it -- you heard him say that 70 percent of the Iraqis were satisfied, in that paper they sent me. Now, you'll see a document that's in this package here that told me six months before -- well, in the victory document he says we have 212,000 people trained now, Iraqi security people. Last year, we had 96,000.

Yet, they wrote to me six months before the last year's statement that said they had 200,000. Now, why don't I believe them when they say anything? They said we got weapons of mass destruction. They said we got an Al Qaida connection. They said we got nuclear weapons. They said we cross this red line which surrounds Baghdad and we're going to have a war with them.

Eighty percent of the people, according to a British poll reported by the Washington Times, says we want the United States out; 77 percent of the people in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt say there's a better chance of democracy if the United States is not there because we're considered occupiers; 45 percent of the people in Iraq think that it's justified to kill Americans. They even had an official communique that says it's justified to attack Americans.

So in this country, when I made my initial proposal to redeploy the troops and to make a diplomat effort and the only way I think this will work -- I don't think you can continue to draw down the way they're talking about. They're going to withdraw. There's no question they're going to withdraw. I predict a big proportion of the troops will be out by next year.

MURTHA: But the problem is they're just as vulnerable. The biggest vulnerability we have in Iraq is the convoys. Every convoy is attacked. When I was in Anbar, at Haditha, every single convoy was attacked that goes there to bring the logistics and supplies that they need. That's the most vulnerable part of our deployment.

And if you have half the troops there, you're going to still have to supply them, resupply them on the ground and they're going to be attacked.

When I said we can't win a military victory, it's because the Iraqis have turned against us. They throw a hand grenade or a rocket into American forces and the people run into the crowd and they -- nobody tells them where they are.

I am convinced, and everything that I've read, the conclusion I've reached is there will be less terrorism, there will be less danger to the United States and it'll be less insurgency once we're out.

I think the Iraqis themselves will turn against this very small group of Al Qaida.

They keep saying the terrorists are going to control Iraq -- no way. Al Qaida's only 7 percent of the people in Iraq and doing this fighting. The terrorists -- there's several factions, but let's say Al Qaida is 7 percent at the very most.

Iraq will get rid of them because they'll tell the Iraqis where they are and it will be the end of the terrorist activity.

Now, my plan says redeploy to the periphery, to Kuwait, to Okinawa, and if there's a terrorist activity that affects our allies or affects the United States' national security, we can then go back in.

I'm not talking about going back in if there's civil war, because we're in a civil war right now. We're caught in between a civil war right now.

MURTHA: And with that I'll end and answer any questions you may have.

 

basso, I'm crushed! You left out the tricorder.





edit: I didn't see the great post from No Worries. How do you respond to what Murtha had to say, basso? Don't you think it's past time that, at the very least, Bush asked for Rumsfeld's resignation? At the very least? Either Bush is being lied to, and considering how stupid the man is, that's certainly possible, or he is just lying to the American people himself. Personally, I think it's both.


Keep D&D Civil.

 

Something else murtha said today that's worth mentioning and wasn't in no worries' article.

Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), D-Pa., a longtime hawk on military matters who now wants U.S. troops pulled out of Iraq, said the military has told him it plans to ask for $100 billion more for the war next year. That is in addition to the $50 billion that Congress is expected to approve for this year before adjourning, and the $200 billion that lawmakers already have given the president for Iraq since 2003.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051207/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_iraq_22

 

video here for the reading challenged:

http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Murtha-responds-tio-Bush.wmv