So said the only Iraq war veteran serving in the United States Congress, Pennsylvania Democrat Patrick Murphy. The stirring speech occurred Wednesday during House debate on Iraq Accountability Act Conference Report.
How many more suicide bombs must kill American soldiers before this president offers a timeline for our troops to come home? How many more military leaders must declare the war will not be won militarily before this president demands that the Iraqis stand up and fight for their country?
….I ask my colleagues on the other side of the aisle…will you stand with us next year to offer a timeline on the war’s fifth anniversary? How about a timeline on the sixth? How about a timeline on the tenth? Because that’s what voting no does. It says no to the tough questions. No to accountability. And no to providing our troops on the ground with a clear mission.
Go ahead, chicken hawks, question Murphy’s patriotism.
My in-laws live in his district. My wife and her parents worked on his campaign in ’06; he beat an incumbent Republican by a fairly small margin (Fitzgerald).
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He has served and is serving his country well.
I am also very glad he got the standing ovation he deserved, but this war was never about protecting the American people, this war was always about securing the Middle East and not merely for oil but to establish a permanent American occupied center of the middle east, a buffer between Iran and Israel, and an American military launching pad to be used if needed to go into any other country in the Middle East and let them know whose boss. The Republicans, the Bush administration, and the military-industrial complex are willing to tolerate these casualties, to be honest they are low casualties compared to other wars, to be able to build those bases, to be able to keep that geopolitical calculation intact. Sure they failed at creating democracy, they failed at finding weapons, and they are failing at securing that country to make it stable enough that our permanent occupation will be successful. But let us not kid ourselves, this is our next Germany, our next Korea, they want to keep us there indefinitely because they need us there indefinitely. Much like Germany was strategically the vital center of Europe, the fault line between East and West, Iraq is the center of the new fault line, and not between the fictional ideology of “Islamism” and western democracy, but between the strategic resources of the Middle East and our true strategic competitors Russia and China. Rep. Murphy and his comrades in arms should realize that they are merely pawns in a much greater geopolitical calculation one that could shape the foreign policy of the next century.
Until the administration admits that it was never any of the fraudulent reasons they ahd previously given, it’s more effective to refute the administrations public claims.
a much greater geopolitical calculation one that could shape the foreign policy of the next century.
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Oh yes, a book I read over a decade ago:
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A Peace to End All Peace
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Funny how history can repeat itself?
That this was the goal from the beginning, one wonders why it hasn’t been sold better.
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What you describe is a pretty good reason to maintain a sizable rapid-action force based in Kuwait or in the Iraqi desert.
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Worked out pretty well in Korea and in Germany, unless there was a global nuclear war in the last six decades that I forgot about.
No, luckily it was thwarted by a teenage Matthew Broderick.
Go ahead, chicken hawks, question Murphy’s patriotism
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…seriously, what does patriotism have to do with any of this? The guy was a dupe.
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PATRIOT, n.
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One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors
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–Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
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And Bierce was exactly correct.
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Regarding jconway @ Thu Apr 26, 2007 at 17:49:19 PM EDT apparently you are unaware of the fact that US military personnel liked being stationed in Germany (and northern Italy, by the way) because it was a quite comfy site. That was clear from the 1980s, when we started coming to Germany and northern Italy. It had nothing to do with US or even Nato defense. It had to do with the fact that they liked being there. And, quite frankly, so do we–but unlike them, we don’t do it at taxpayers’ expense.
…because the right as so jingoized the word and now uses is it as an attack. Anyone who doesn’t agree with the right is “unpatriotic”.
Of course a genuine American patriot is someone who deeply cherishes the democratic ideals on which this country was founded. Yes, they were radical ideas at the time and still are in much of the world today.
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And they are anathema to the Bush administration.
The US military would not keep troops somewhere merely because “they liked being stationed there” using that logic half our military should be drinking cocktails while defending Tahiti. No, the real reason they were in Germany and still are is because the US does not want the industrial base of central Europe to escape its control and protection, likewise Iraq must be a permanent base of US control to secure the resources in the Persian Gulf, NOT from a rogue state or terrorist regime but from a peer competitor like Russia or China.
…you want to believe, Mr. or Ms. jconway, but the fact is that American military personnel have not been needed in either Germany or Italy for over a decade and a half, and, yet, they are still there (here).
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Some of them murdered a few people on a Seilbahn in northern Italy a few years ago, and got off scott free.