The Washington Post, in an editorial, argues that there’s plenty of irresponsibility to go around the controversy surrounding Jack Murtha, the Congress, the White House and Iraq policy. Highlights:
It sounds like the final days of a bitter, mud-slinging political campaign. But what is at stake is not an election but a war in which American soldiers are being killed and wounded almost every day and in which one possible outcome is a major victory for the Islamic extremist movement that carried out the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Those losses won’t be stemmed, nor the dangers averted, by attack rhetoric or sound bites that deliberately distort the facts. Leaders of both parties know that, of course. Which raises the question: Is their priority to win in Iraq — or in next year’s midterm elections?…
….Yet Mr. Murtha, like other Democrats who advocate an early pullout, grossly misstates the nature of the conflict in Iraq. In a news conference, he contended that U.S. troops “have become the primary target” and have united Iraqis against them. In fact, far more Iraqis than Americans are being killed by the insurgents; Iraq is divided between a Shiite and Kurdish majority — whose leaders strongly support a continued U.S. presence — and a Sunni and Islamic extremist minority that seeks to drive international forces out so that it can try to impose a dictatorship on the rest of the country. As Democrats such as Sens. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) have recognized, a premature American departure from Iraq would not end but greatly escalate what is now a low-grade civil war. It could allow al Qaeda to claim a triumph and establish a base for attacking the United States and its allies in the Middle East.
Mr. Bush indulges in his own surreal rhetoric, insistently describing Iraq as a Manichaean battle between foreign terrorists and Iraqi democrats, rather than the multi-sided power struggle that it is. In so doing, he hamstrings his own diplomats and generals, who are trying to forge a political accord among the various Iraqi communities and isolate the foreign and Sunni extremists through a conventional counterinsurgency campaign. Many Democrats have no better alternative strategy, which may be why their leaders spend most of their time making charges about what was said, or not, about weapons of mass destruction in 2002.