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Murtha's Muddle

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, November 30, 2007 4:20 PM PT

Iraq: After years of leading Congress' cut-and-run forces, John Murtha, House Appropriations defense subcommittee chairman, believes the surge is working. The Pelosi Democrats don't know if they're coming or going.

Related Topics: Iraq

How exactly can House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defend the obstruction of $200 billion in emergency combat operations funding for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan when one of her closest cronies, the Vietnam vet she tried to install as House majority leader, now believes America is winning the war there?

Murtha's "Road to Baghdad" conversion may not have knocked him to the ground with a blinding light. But it's certain to throw congressional Democrats for a loop as it exposes their years of blindness on the importance of winning in Iraq as part of the global war on terror.
Pelosi and Murtha back in January, when both were still on the same page and convinced the surge then getting under way would never work.

Pelosi and Murtha back in January, when both were still on the same page and convinced the surge then getting under way would never work.

Only last summer Murtha was calling belief in the chances of President Bush's new counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, with a new commander and 30,000 fresh troops and Marines, "delusional to say the least."

"I'm absolutely convinced right now the surge isn't working," and "there's no way you're going to have success," he told ABC in June. In other venues, Murtha has accused the Pentagon of lying in reporting that the surge was effective.

But in the wake of his trip to Iraq last month, Murtha said in a videoconference from his congressional district office, "I think the surge is working."

This while the congressman insists that $50 billion is all Bush will get for Iraq and Afghanistan this year.

Murtha also made the usual complaints about lack of political progress and reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites — in spite of the fact that thousands of Sunnis and Shiites are now working together manning checkpoints and conducting other security operations directed against al-Qaida in various regions of Iraq.

Two months into the new fiscal year, the Democratic Congress has failed to pass almost all its annual spending bills. Yet Democratic leaders such as Murtha, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada don't seem to feel even a tinge of shame in whining about a society that, deeply divided ethnically and religiously for centuries, has been unable to iron out all its divisions overnight.

Representative government is alien to the Arab Middle East. What right do Democrats in Congress have to expect Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki and the various factions of the Iraqi parliament instantly to do what it took the genius of America's founding fathers and Constitutional framers many years to achieve?

Beyond the embarrassing questions now sure to be asked of Pelosi about Murtha's unexpected flip-flop, and Democrats' crass unreasonableness toward a people who risk their lives to exercise the voting rights we take for granted, there's something bigger for Pelosi, Reid and the Democrats running for president to think about:

Murtha, like so many other high-ranking Democrats in the House and Senate, and those seeking the White House, was "absolutely convinced" that surrender was the only answer in Iraq.

They were so sure of their position that when the party's 2000 vice-presidential nominee, Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, placed patriotism before the party line, they actually let someone take the Democratic senatorial nomination away from him and tried, without success, to beat him in his 2006 bid for re-election.

Democrats have invested everything in losing the war in Iraq and blaming it on President Bush, and now they've been proved wrong. Murtha has admitted it; other Democrats, one by one, will follow.

How much faith can Americans place in a party so committed to a national failure — and now so discredited?