THE GENE MCCARTHY OF IRAQ WAR

John Murtha, (Dem. PA), is the Gene McCarthy of the Iraq War.

A majority of Americans may not know or remember “Clean Gene.” He was the educator, poet and Minnesota Senator who blew the whistle on President Johnson’s failed war in Vietnam. To those of us coming of age in the mid-1960’s, he was the one ray of hope in a Congress that sheepishly followed Johnson’s Democratic war party down the road to disaster in Vietnam.

When he received more delegates 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. Unfortunately, McCarthy was too anti-establishment for the Democratic party so they dumped him for Bobby Kennedy. When Kennedy was assassinated, they turned not to McCarthy, but to war party staple Hubert Humphrey. The result was the election of Republican Richard Nixon who prolonged the war for seven agonizing years resulting in almost as many American casualties as had occurred up to his election.

We anti-war activists, now grizzled senior citizens, have had to come out of retirement in a new century to oppose another disastrous unnecessary war, this time in Iraq. And it is fitting that our Pied Piper is grizzled septuagenarian Vietnam combat marine veteran John Murtha. He came out of a pro war, pro military stance to speak the truth that the war was un-winnable and our presence in Iraq was doing more harm than good. His vision helped the Democrats regain the House and Senate after twelve years of Republican rule, the last five of which have been a descent into military madness.

And how did the Democratic party reward Rep. Murtha? They dumped him as Speaker Pelosi’s choice of majority leader in the House in favor of Steny Hoyer, (Dem. MD). Hoyer, predictably, has been AWOL from the effort to withdraw our soldiers from the catastrophe in Iraq.

If history repeats itself, we have about seven more years of slaughter in Iraq before we find a face-saving way to withdraw from certain defeat. And John Murtha, like Gene McCarthy, forty years earlier, will become a mere footnote in the folly of another deadly, unnecessary war.

Originally published in Chicago Sun-Times, November 27, 2006