John Murtha adds teeth to his original comments
Good. A clarification.
When Congressman Murtha said the surge has improved things, particularly in Anbar province, the press immediately spun it as an endorsement of all the strategies employed by the White House in the past year, even though his original comments also criticized the Iraq government. The press also indicated his words posed problems for Democrats.
As a Democrat, the only problem I had was with the press spin, not with Murtha’s quoted comments. With his clarification, there can be no doubt what his intents were: they echo what two GOP Congressmen said earlier this week:
The surge, he said in a statement, “has created a window of opportunity for the Iraqi government,’’ but so far the Iraqi government has “failed to capitalize on the political and diplomatic steps that the surge was designed to provide.”
“The fact remains that the war in Iraq cannot be won militarily, and that we must begin an orderly redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq as soon as practicable,” said the chair of the House Appropriations Committee’s Defense Subcommittee.
If the press operated impartially, they would have been skipping the ‘gotcha’ spin and asked some proper followup questions. Such as:
Do you attribute the decline in violence to the strategy of Sunnis and US forces uniting against other outsiders, or has the ceasefire of 8/29 by Moqtada al-Sadr been part of that violence reduction?
But we’ve learned the corporate press remains more interested in creating controversy than ferreting out a clear picture of what’s happening in Iraq.
I sure miss journalism.
