Words from John Murtha

Originally Posted by pgardn

I guess American lives are more important than Iraqi lives.

Folks like it or not, we made a decision, it is a mess. If we leave, huge numbers of innocent folks will die. We are being asked by leaders on both sides to stay because they know what will happen if we leave. You see cameras of people shouting at us to leave, but the people who have access to information know what will happen if we leave.

It has turned into Sunni v. Shiite. This is where the vast majority of deaths are occurring now. And BTW, we are still in Afghanistan also. Should we leave?

Our troops are doing what I consider the ultimate in altruism. We are preventing people from being slaughtered whole sale. And these are people that do not even realize it. The troops will never get the credit they deserve. They are saving innocent people that quite possibly hate them.

It has turned Sunni v Shiite and it is not the business of America. Let them have their Civil War and figure out who they are as a nation. America lost 600,000 men (2% of the population at the time- equivalent to 6 million today) to figure out what it was. You can't tell countries what they will be, they have to figure it out themselves.

As for Afghanistan, we should stay there, in fact we should have never gone to Iraq and we should have put all our resources into Afghanistan. It would be much more of a success had we. The problem is the idiot neocons and their friends couldn't make the money off that war. FACE IT, the Iraq war was planned long before 9-11, some feel it was planned in the mid 90's after the first Iraq war, back when we had a competent Bush as President, not his son.