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Murtha calls Iraq ‘quagmire,’ says military must be ready for other threats
May 1, 2008
By Doug Green
Calling the war in Iraq, an “undefined and open-ended” mission that is propping up an Iraqi government “riddled with corruption and paralyzed by incompetence,” Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) said Thursday that the U.S. should draw down troops to ensure optimal readiness for the threats that could be posed by nations such as China and Russia.
Speaking to an audience at the Center for American Progress on the fifth anniversary of President Bush’s infamous “mission accomplished” declaration aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Murtha, the chair of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, pledged that the forthcoming war supplemental spending bill would include language regarding a timeline for withdrawal, a ban on torture, and the need for a fully equipped and trained military. He also denounced past appropriations levels, which have brought the total direct cost of the war to $675 billion, and said the next supplemental would be more fiscally prudent.
“If the United States has a $410 billion budget deficit, why should we be paying out of pocket to rebuild a country with a significant budget surplus,” Murtha said.
He cited past U.S. interventions in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia to portray the current conflict as another failed mission unable to win hearts and minds, but suggested that the situation in Iraq is far worse than what America confronted in those nations.
“In Vietnam, we never had a strategy to win,” he said. “In Iraq, we never had a strategy.”
Murtha deemed the situation in Iraq a “quagmire” and noted some of the effects of the war, including a massive refugee crisis, substandard electricity production, and the cordoning off of Baghdad neighborhoods into what Sadr City residents recently described as city-like prisons. He said that while “unemployment remains as high as 50 percent in certain areas” of the country, some young men are able to feed their families for a year by laying improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
Murtha returned to the issue of U.S. military readiness often throughout the speech, saying that this has plummeted over the course of the past five years to a point now where there is “not one brigade…rated at the highest level of readiness.” He expressed optimism that efforts to redeploy from Iraq would be aided by the termination of the U.N. resolution on the war, which gives U.S. forces the power to act without consultation of the Iraqi government.
“I believe that Iraq won’t ask for a new U.N. resolution,” Murtha said. “I believe they want to take this thing over for themselves.”
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