Murtha's Okinawa option

Blackfive:

This morning on Meet the Cuomo aide, Tim Russert's guest was firebrand Congressman and Congressional Cowardice Caucus Chairman, John Murtha. In addition to reiterating his invocation of the Clinton evacuation from Somalia in 1993 as the example the US should follow in Iraq, he described his plan to take out Zarqawi from bases outside of Iraq.

Russert played an interesting quote from Karl Rove to the effect that: if we bailed out of Iraq to leave it in shambles, what Persian Gulf nation would paint a target on its back by allowing us to operate from their soil with the implicit acceptance that if things went bad for them, the US would turn tail and run? Following that assertion, Russert queried Murtha on just how we could have taken out Zarqawi under such conditions. Without missing a beat Murtha accepted Rove's premise by claiming that the entire Zarqawi operation could have been run out of... Okinawa. Yeah, that's right, Okinawa. The basis of this claim is that Zarqawi was bombed (ostensibly from aircraft that could have come from outside Iraq) and therefore why not just pull chalks and slink back to Oki where we could comfortably launch bombing missions at will.

Of course this ignores the six week 24/7 Taskforce 145 "Unblinking Eye" intelligence and surveillance operation that led to having a Delta SR team with eyes on target and designating it with a laser. Apparently Murtha thinks that somebody called 1-800-ZARQAWI with 10 digit grid coordinates and voila! an F-16 launches from Okinawa and 10-12 hours later... poof, no more Zarqawi. Let's take a look at that infiltration shall we?

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There is more including this graphic showing the difficulty of going from Okinawa to Iraq. Why the media and even the Democrats take this man seriously is an open question. He certainly is not offering a practical solution to the problems he percieves in Iraq. Part of his problems is that much of his analysis is based on a false premise that the US troops have become the main target for the terrorist, when simple observation as well as their own words demonstrates that non combatants are the terrorist main target in Iraq.