Redux: Rep. Tim Ryan Blasts Bush's Iraq Record

On September 21, 2006, Rep Tim Ryan (D-OH) gave this powerful speech in the House which I think should be played on TV screens around the US as a campaign commercial for all Democratic candidates. It also goes well with Jack Murtha's editorial in the Washington Post today, Confessions of a 'Defeatocrat'.

Despite the presence of more than 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, 23,000 Americans injured or killed, tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths and the expenditure of nearly a half a trillion dollars, here are the dismal results:

· In September, 776 U.S troops were wounded in Iraq, the highest monthly toll in more than two years.

· Over the past year, the number of attacks against U.S. personnel has doubled, rising from 400 to more than 800 per week.

· Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, recently acknowledged that sectarian violence has replaced the insurgency as the single biggest threat to Iraq.

· In the past two months, 6,000 Iraqis died, more than in the first year of the war.

· Last week, electricity output averaged 2.4 hours per day in Baghdad and 10.4 hours nationwide -- 7 percent less than in the same period in 2005.

· A Sept. 27 World Public Opinion poll indicated that 91 percent of Iraqi Sunnis and 74 percent of Iraqi Shiites want the Iraqi government to ask U.S.-led forces to withdraw within a year. Ninety-seven percent of Sunnis and 82 percent of Shiites said that the U.S. military presence is "provoking more conflict than it is preventing." And Iraqi support for attacks against U.S.-led forces has increased sharply over the past few months, from 47 percent to 61 percent.

Now, Karl Rove may call me a defeatist, but can anyone living in the real world deny that these statistics are heading in the wrong direction? Yet despite this bleak record of performance, the president continues to stand by his team of failed architects, preferring to prop them up instead of demanding accountability.

Democrats are fighting a war on two fronts: One is combating the spin and intimidation that defines this administration. The other is fighting to change course, to do things better, to substitute smart, disciplined strategy for dogma and denial in Iraq.

That's not defeatism. That's our duty.

Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) is the ranking member on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee.

He served 37 years in the Marine Corps.