The week after Rep. John Murtha’s dramatic call to bring the troops home, the nation’s major magazines feature a smattering of offerings about the Pennsylvania congressman and the larger question of Iraq.
Newsweek gets things rolling with a piece by Howard Fineman. According to Murtha’s friends, Fineman writes, the Vietnam veteran — the first one elected to the House, back in 1974 — “had been searching his soul for months, seeking guidance on what to do in Congress about Iraq.” Said one congressional colleague: “I think he was going through what we Catholics call a ‘dark night of the soul.'” Fineman explains that though the 73-year-old House dean of defense spending has “always been a down-the-line hawk and a favorite of the Pentagon generals,” his last trip to Iraq convinced him both that the war was unwinnable and that the military’s continued presence there was only making things worse. And so just as his hero Tip O’Neill once shocked Lyndon Johnson by telling him the Vietnam War was a lost cause, Murtha now decided “it was his turn to confront a president with harsh truths.”
U.S. News & World Report tells us that Murtha’s strident withdrawal call stunned the president, though according to aides “Bush isn’t taking it personally”: “A senior U.S. official who discussed the matter with Bush said the president believes Murtha’s change of heart was motivated by genuine conviction, unlike the harsh criticism of Bush’s lead up to war from other Democrats. ‘Congressman Murtha based his position on principled opposition to the war,’ said a Bush adviser. ‘Other Democrats are resorting to chicanery.'”
In an editorial titled “Abandoning Iraq,” the Weekly Standard reacts much more vociferously, slamming Murtha for a “breathtakingly irresponsible” outburst that did not “bother to ask, much less answer, the most serious questions his proposal raises.” “What would be the likely outcome in Iraq if the United States pulled out? Does Murtha actually believe the Iraqi people could fight the al Qaeda terrorists and Saddam Hussein loyalists by themselves once American forces left?” ask Robert Kagan and William Kristol. “[H]e knows perfectly well that the Iraqi people are not yet capable of defending themselves against the monsters in their midst and that, therefore, a U.S. withdrawal would likely lead to carnage on a scale that would dwarf what is now occurring in Iraq.” Victory is indeed possible, they add, “though it will require a longer war than anyone would like, but not so long a war as to be intolerable.”
In an insightful column for Time, Joe Klein uses Murtha as a jumping-off point for an examination of the broader war strategy, noting that John McCain “is one of the few remaining American politicians who want to send more troops to the war zone” and that the current number of 160,000 troops in Iraq could be halved by next summer. Klein’s sharp takedown of Donald Rumsfeld is striking. Writes Klein: “Rumsfeld’s relative indifference to the shooting war since the fall of Baghdad, combined with the president’s garishly bellicose rhetoric and refusal to ask wartime sacrifices of the public, has led to a national embarrassment — a cloddish superpower that talks big and acts small — and is leading to an inevitable, irresponsible sidle out of Iraq.”
Back in Newsweek, Jonathan Alter soundly argues that instead of politicians and the media bickering and obsessing over the war-related past, there should be “a big national debate” over the plan for the future. “Instead of cut-and-run versus more-of-the-same, we need a few imaginative ‘Third Way’ alternatives,” Alter says. He mostly examines one “strategic redeployment” plan put forward by the Center for American Progress, in which Lawrence Korb and Brian Katulis argue for bringing home about half of America’s troops by the end of 2006, pledging not to build permanent bases in the country, and “a major diplomatic initiative to bring surrounding Arab nations into Iraq as peacekeepers and to beef up American support for democratic institutions” — but it’s a start.
Alter, though, is not optimistic. “[F]or now it looks as if we’ll keep sinking in the quicksand, with no consensus, no substantive debate and no end to the finger-pointing,” he writes. “It’s almost enough to make you nostalgic for Vietnam.”
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.