John Murtha is now off the reservation.
If I had to pick one of the least likely candidates to demand an immediate pullout from Iraq, the Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania would be right up there. Vietnam veteran, big Pentagon supporter, rarely makes waves on the Hill. We're not talking Ted Kennedy here. He supported the Gulf war and the Iraq war. And yet the guy holds a news conference yesterday and says it's time to go because "our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency."
The Murtha Moment follows Bill Clinton saying the war was a mistake, John Edwards saying his vote was a mistake, the Nation saying it won't support any pro-war Dems, Senate Republicans saying the White House should fill out quarterly report cards on how it's getting us the heck out, and a few things I'm sure I've forgotten.
The point is not that an irresistible groundswell for withdrawal is sweeping the country. The point is that the landscape is changing as politicians scramble to catch up with polls showing a majority sees the war as a blunder. We seem to have moved beyond the administration's things-are-improving-in-Iraq argument to a more narrow focus on how to extricate American troops. (Anyone old enough to remember "Vietnamization" knows what I'm talking about.)
But this is still the backseat debate. The frontseat debate is Dick Cheney accusing critics of prewar intelligence of engaging in "one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city." It's Harry Reid saying: "The White House needs to understand that deceiving the American people is what got them into trouble. Now is the time to come clean, not to continue the pattern of deceit."
As I noted earlier this week, it's easier to fight about who misled whom than to find a viable exit strategy.
The LAT headline calls Murtha a "Hawkish Democrat":
"Signaling heightened opposition to the war in Iraq from a corner of long-standing support for the military, Rep. John Murtha, a conservative Pennsylvania Democrat, said today the United States should immediately begin to bring its troops home. . . .
"His declaration, at a Washington news conference, suggested that President Bush has lost a key supporter of the war -- a knowledgeable Democrat to whom others in the party turn for advice and leadership on military issues."
The NYT casts Murtha as firing one more shot in the political wars: "The partisan furor over the Iraq war ratcheted up sharply on Capitol Hill on Thursday, as an influential House Democrat on military matters called for the immediate withdrawal of American troops and Republicans escalated their attacks against the Bush administration's critics. . . .
"He emotionally denounced 'people with five deferments,' a veiled reference to Vice President Cheney, who dared to challenge veterans like him who served honorably about their views."
"Murtha, a Vietnam veteran," says the Philadelphia Inquirer , "joins a growing number of veterans in Congress putting the administration on the defensive about the war and related policies. Some critics think growing skepticism about the war throughout the country is pushing Congress to a tipping point, illustrated this week by a bipartisan Senate resolution calling for the President to spell out an exit strategy from Iraq."
