AllahPundit [1] over at Hot Air is reporting Murtha is finally admitting the surge is working.
The question is will ever apoligize to the troops he slandered?
More Memorandum
Update and Bump: (Bit)
CNN is saying [2] that Murtha has taken the unusual step of clarifying his remaks, through a spokesman in Johnstown:
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.
So, clearly, Nancy Pelosi got to him. I’ve always wondered what she looks like with falme in her eyes and steam rising from her ears…
But here again, we come to something that I said about a week ago.. [3]. Because the federal government there is tied up in knots, they assume nothing can be done to deal with the problems Iraqis fast as a country.
With all the progress that’s been happening in Iraq of late, the last refuge of the left is to complain that the Iraqi federal government there doesn’t have it’s act together.
While that’s true in large degree, it’s also beside the point. Change… real change… particularly the positive kind… cannot be imposed from above, it has to come from the people themselves. That’s exactly what is happening currently in Iraq. [4]
There’s an interesting parallel, here between the Left’s view of the relationship between the Iraqi federal and provincial governments, and their American equivalents.
When Katrina was an issue, the left complained [5] the federal government didn’t respond as they would have liked, but made no mention as to the actions of the state and local governments. . Invariably, they pointed at Louisiana as their example. Yet, they ignored similarly hard hit Mississippi’s recovery [6], which was driven at the state level. [7]
As with Katrina, the left under-estimates and underplays the role of the local governments… those levels of government not federal in nature. In both cases… Iraq and Mississippi, what needs to be done is largely being dealt with at the provincial/state level. [8] The provincial governments are agreeing on what the federal government could not, and things are getting done. This is an outcome that the left didn’t have on it’s radar simply because it doesn’t match their worldview of a huge centralized, all powerful government.
There’s a lesson there.
That’s precisely the kind of duck and cover maneuver that Jack Murtha is involved with, with this “clarification”. He refuses to recognize that the very reason that our military is winning this thing is because of the locals getting their act together… Irrespective of what the Federal government is doing. Indeed , this list of recent successes is happening, not despite the absence of the Federal government, there, but BECAUSE of it.
That, of course, it is something that the Democrats dare not say.