The year was 1993. The place was Somalia.
Murtha said the U.S. had to no choice but to pull out now, explaining:
“There’s no military solution. Some of them will tell you [that] to get [warlord Mohamed Farrah] Aidid is the solution. I don’t agree with that.”
“Our welcome has been worn out,” Murtha told NBC’s “Today” show in Sept. 1993, a month after 4 U.S. Military Police had been killed in Somalia by a remote-detonated land mine…
The Pennsylvania Democrat announced that President Clinton had been “listening to our suggestions. And I think you’ll see him move those troops out very quickly.”
Sounds pretty similar to his speeches these days.
But back then, Clinton took Murtha’s advice and ordered the withdrawal - a decision that Osama bin Laden would later credit with emboldening his terrorist fighters and encouraging him to mount further attacks against the U.S.
In a 1998 interview with ABC’s John Miller, Osama bin Laden said that America’s withdrawal from Somalia had emboldened his burgeoning al Qaida force and encouraged him to plan new attacks.“Our people realize[d] more than before that the American soldier is a paper tiger that run[s] in defeat after a few blows,” the terror chief recalled. “America forgot all about the hoopla and media propaganda and left dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat.”
Cutting and running had a disasterous affect on our troops then, why would we expect that it would work any differently this time?
And would somebody mind informing MSM about this story? Seems they’ve selectively filtered Murtha’s past out of their research…
