[Peace-discuss] Murtha (and Obama) on the war

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From Counterpunch's editor, an assessment (which seems to me
quite accurate) of some Congressional representatives' views 
on the war.  --CGE]

  The Revolt of the Generals
  By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

The immense significance of Rep. John Murtha's November 17
speech calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq is that it
signals mutiny in the US senior officer corps, seeing the
institution they lead as "broken, worn out" and "living hand
to mouth", to use the biting words of their spokesman, John
Murtha, as he reiterated on December 1 his denunciation of
Bush's destruction of the Army.

A CounterPuncher with nearly 40 years experience working in
and around the Pentagon told me this week that "The Four Star
Generals picked Murtha to make this speech because he has
maximum credibility." It's true. Even in the US Senate there's
no one with quite Murtha's standing to deliver the message,
except maybe for Byrd, but the venerable senator from West
Virginia was a vehement opponent of the war from the outset,
whereas Murtha voted for it and only recently has turned around.

So the Four-Star Generals briefed Murtha and gave him the
state-of-the-art data which made his speech so deadly,
stinging the White House into panic-stricken and foolish
denunciations of Murtha as a clone of Michael Moore.

It cannot have taken vice president Cheney, a former US
Defense Secretary, more than a moment to scan Murtha's speech
and realize the import of Murtha's speech as an announcement
that the generals have had enough.

Listen once more to what the generals want the country to know:

    "The future of our military is at risk. Our military and
our families are stretched thin. Many say the Army is broken.
Some of our troops are on a third deployment. Recruitment is
down even as the military has lowered its standards. They
expect to take 20 percent category 4, which is the lowest
category, which they said they'd never take. They have been
forced to do that to try to meet a reduced quota.

    "Defense budgets are being cut. Personnel costs are
skyrocketing, particularly in health care. Choices will have
to be made. We cannot allow promises we have made to our
military families in terms of service benefits, in terms of
their health care to be negotiated away. Procurement programs
that ensure our military dominance cannot be negotiated away.
We must be prepared.

    "The war in Iraq has caused huge shortfalls in our bases
at home. I've been to three bases in the United States, and
each one of them were short of things they need to train the
people going to Iraq.

    "Much of our ground equipment is worn out.

    "Most importantly -- this is the most important point --
incidents have increased from 150 a week to over 700 in the
last year. Instead of attacks going down over a time when we
had additional more troops, attacks have grown dramatically.
Since the revolution at Abu Ghraib, American casualties have
doubled."

What happened on the heels of this speech is very instructive.
The Democrats fell over themselves distancing themselves from
Murtha, emboldening the White House to go one the attack.

>From Bush's presidential plane, touring Asia, came the
derisive comment that Murtha was of "endorsing the policies of
Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic
Party."

It took the traveling White House about 48 hours to realize
that this was a dumb thing to have said. Murtha's not the kind
of guy you can slime, the way Bush and Co did the glass-jawed
Kerry in 2004. The much decorated vet Murtha snapped back
publicly that he hadn't much time for smears from people like
Cheney who'd got five deferments from military service in Vietnam.

By the weekend Bush was speaking of Murtha respectfully. On
Monday, gritting his teeth, Cheney told a Washington audience
that though he disagreed with Murtha ihe's a good man, a
Marine, a patriot, and he's taking a clear stand in an
entirely legitimate discussion."

One day later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox
News, ``I do not think that American forces need to be there
in the numbers that they are now because -- for very much
longer -- because Iraqis are stepping up.'' A week later Bush
was preparing a speech laying heavy emphasis on US withdrawals
as the Iraqi armed forces take up the burden.

Are there US-trained Iraqi detachments ready in the wings? Not
if you believe reports from Iraq, but they could be
nonagenarians armed with bows and arrows and the Bush high
command would still be invoking their superb training and
readiness for the great mission.

Ten days after Murtha's speech commentators on the tv Sunday
talk shows were clambering aboard the Bring 'em home
bandwagon. Voices calling for America to "stay the course" in
Iraq were few and far between. On December 1 Murtha returned
to the attack in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, telling a civic group
there that he was wrong to have voted for the war and that
most U.S. troops will leave Iraq within a year because the
Army is "broken, worn out" and "living hand to mouth".

The stench of panic in Washington that hangs like a winter fog
over Capitol Hill intensified. The panic stems from the core
concern of every politician in the nation's capital: survival.
The people sweating are Republicans and the source of their
terror is the deadly message spelled out in every current
poll: Bush's war on Iraq spells disaster for the Republican
Party in next year's midterm elections.

Take a mid-November poll by SurveyUSA: in only seven states
did Bush's current approval rating exceed 50 percent. These
consisted of the thinly populated states of Utah, Idaho,
Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi. In
twelve states, including California, New York, Illinois,
Pennsylvania and Michigan, his rating was under 35.

You have to go back to the early 1970s, when a scandal-stained
Nixon was on the verge of resignation, to find numbers lower
than Bush's. Like Bush, Nixon had swept to triumphant
reelection in 1972. Less than two years later he turned the
White House over to vice president Ford and flew off into exile.

No one expects Bush to resign, or even to be impeached (though
vice president Cheney's future is less assured) and his second
term has more than three years to run.

But right now, to use a famous phrase from the Nixon era, a
cancer is gnawing at his presidency and that cancer is the war
in Iraq. The American people are now 60 per cent against it
and 40 per cent think Bush lied to get them to back it.

Hence the panic. Even though the seats in the House of
Representatives are now so gerrymandered that less than 50 out
of 435 districts are reckoned as ever being likely to change
hands, Republicans worry that few seats, however
gerrymandered, can withstand a Force 5 political hurricane.

What they get from current polls is a simple message. If the
US has not withdrawn substantial numbers of its troops from
Iraq by the fall of next year, a Force 5 storm surge might
very well wash them away.

Amid this potential debacle, the Republicans' only source of
comfort is the truly incredible conduct of the Democrats.
First came the Democrats' terrified reaction to Murtha,
symbolized by Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi's
cancellation of a press conference supporting Murtha. This
prompted the Republicans to realize that the Democrats were
ready to have their bluff called by the Republican-sponsored
resolution calling for immediate withdrawal, for which only
three Democrats voted, while so-called progressives like
Kucinich and Sanders and Conyers ran for cover.

Listen to any prominent Democrat senator, like Kerry or
Clinton or Feingold or Obama and you get the same adamant
refusal to go beyond the savage characterization by Glenn Ford
and Peter Gamble of the Black Commentator, of Obama's address
to the Council on Foreign Relations:

    "U.S. Senator Barack Obama has planted his feet deeply
inside the Iraq war-prolongation camp of the Democratic Party,
the great swamp that, if not drained, will swallow up any hope
of victory over the GOP in next year's congressional
elections. In a masterpiece of double-speak before the
prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, November 22, the
Black Illinois lawmaker managed to out-mush-mouth Sen. John
Kerry -- a prodigious feat, indeed.

    "In essence, all Obama wants from the Bush regime is that
it 'fess up to having launched the war based on false
information, and to henceforth come clean with the Senate on
how it plans to proceed in the future. Those Democrats who
want to dwell on the past -- the actual genesis and rationale
for the war, and the real reasons for its continuation --
should be quiet.

    "'Withdrawal' and 'timetables' are bad words, and Obama
will have nothing to do with them.

    "Of course, the 'insurgents' are not a 'faction,' and must
therefore be defeated. On this point, Obama and the Bush men
agree: 'In sum, we have to focus, methodically and without
partisanship, on those steps that will: one, stabilize Iraq,
avoid all out civil war, and give the factions within Iraq the
space they need to forge a political settlement; two, contain
and ultimately extinguish the insurgency in Iraq; and three,
bring our troops safely home.'

    "Nobody in the White House would argue with any of these
points. Point number two in Obama's 'pragmatic' baseline is,
the containment and elimination of the 'insurgency.' Of
course, one can only do that by continuing the war. Indeed, it
appears that Obama and many of his colleagues are more intent
on consulting the Bush men on the best ways to 'win' the war
than in effecting an American withdrawal at any foreseeable time.

    "They want 'victory' just as much as the White House; they
just don't want the word shouted at every press conference."

The Black Commentator concludes its excoriation of Obama and
his fellow Democrats with these words:

    "By late summer of 2006, when voters are deciding what
they want their Senate and House to look like, if the
Democrats have not caught up to public opinion to offer a
tangible and quick exit from Iraq, the Republicans will retain
control of both chambers of congress.

    "All that will be left in November is mush from Kerry,
Hillary, Biden, Edwards -- and Obama's -- mouths."

Here at CounterPunch we heartily endorse this sentiment.

  ###