Has Murtha Lost It?

Someone close to Rep. John Murtha would be well advised to assist him in getting a check up from the neck up, as Imus says. Reuters is reporting that on tonight's Nightline show Murtha will declare that he would not join the military today, presumably because of what he sees as the wrongness of our efforts in Iraq.

Let me try to understand this. Murtha, who served in the Vietnam War, which only had the flimsiest and abstract of connections to the self-interest of the United States, was worth his service. Iraq, which lets us project our power in to the home region of the people who actually attacked us and killed thousands of our fellow citizens. Yes, I know Saddam had no direct connection to the 9/11 murderers, but no Vietnamese ever killed even one American on our soil.

The war in Vietnam could simply not have been prosecuted without the existence of the draft. So far our young people have been willing to come forward in sufficient numbers to sustain the effort in Iraq. If in ten years, as I suspect, we have seen a fundamental transformation in that sorry region which turns potential future terrorists into productive citizens of their newly liberated societies, the young soldiers will have been prove right. The old, still fighting the political battles of a former war will have been proven wrong.