| 36 COMMENTARY___________________________________ CHICAGO SUN-TIMES ♦ MONDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2006 |
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| ________________ | J ohn Murtha (D-Pa.) is the Gene McCarthy of the Iraq war. A majority of Americans may not know or remember "Clean Gene." He was the educa- tor, poet and Minnesota senator who blew the whistle on President Lyndon Johnson's failed war in Vietnam. To those of us coming of age in the mid-1960s, he was the one ray of hope in a Congress that sheepishly followed Johnson's De- mocratic war party down the road to disaster in Vietnam. When he received more dele- gates than the president in the 1968 New Hampshire primary, Johnson began to acknowledge his failure in Vietnam and dropped out of the 1968 presidential election. Unfortu- nately, McCarthy was too anti-es- tablishment for the Democratic Party, so they dumped him for Bobby Kennedy. When Kennedy was assassinated, they turned not |
_____________He will become a mere footnote in the folly of a deadly, unnecessary war. to McCarthy but to war party sta- ple Hubert Humphrey. The result was the election of Republican Richard Nixon, who prolonged the war for seven agonizing years, re- sulting in almost as many Ameri- can casualties as had occurred up to his election. We anti-war activists, now griz- zled senior citizens, have had to come out of retirement in a new century to oppose another disas- trous, unnecessary war -- this time in Iraq. And it is fitting that our Pied Piper is the grizzled sep- tuagenarian Vietnam combat Ma- rine veteran John Murtha. He came out of a pro-war, pro-military stance to speak the truth that the |
war was unwinnable and our pres- ence in Iraq was doing more harm than good. His vision helped the Democrats regain the House and Senate after 12 years of Republi- can rule -- the last five of which have been a descent into military madness. And how did the Democratic Party reward Murtha? They dumped him as Speaker Nancy Pelosi's choice of majority leader in the House in favor of Steny Hoyer (D-Md). Hoyer, predictably, has been AWOL from the effort to withdraw our soldiers from the ca- tastrophe in Iraq. If history repeats itself, we have about seven more years of slaugh- ter in Iraq before we find a face- saving way to withdraw from cer- tain defeat. And John Murtha, like Gene McCarthy 40 years earlier, will become a mere footnote in the folly of a deadly, unnecessary war. Walt Zlotow, Glen Ellyn
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