John Murtha's Plan For Iraq -- Operate From Okinawa

On Meet The Press, Murtha described his strategy to be able to pull all of our troops out of Iraq but still be able to combat terrorism in Iraq, help the Iraqi people and help maintain stability in the Middle-East. You're going to love this. His solution? Redeploy to Okinawa! No, not Okinawa, Kuwait, but Okinawa, Japan.

Here is the transcript, I'm not making this up. It's near the bottom half on page two of the transcript.

It wasn't a slip-up, either. He was talking about other places we could station our troops when we ran from Iraq, and mentioned Kuwait, Qatar and then Okinawa. I figured it was a slip up, and he meant something else. Russert questioned him on this, too:

MR. RUSSERT: But it’d be tough to have a timely response from Okinawa.

REP. MURTHA: Well, it—you know, they—when I say Okinawa, I, I’m saying troops in Okinawa. When I say a timely response, you know, our fighters can fly from Okinawa very quickly. And—and—when they don’t know we’re coming. There’s no question about it. And, and where those airplanes won’t—came from I can’t tell you, but, but I’ll tell you one thing, it doesn’t take very long for them to get in with cruise missiles or with, with fighter aircraft or, or attack aircraft, it doesn’t take any time at all. So we, we have done—this one particular operation, to say that that couldn’t have done, done—it was done from the outside, for heaven’s sakes.

Just in case you're not great with geography (maybe your teacher preferred to teach their political opinions instead of geography ), you can see the distance between Basra and Okinawa here.

I tried to get driving directions to Basra from Okinawa, but it turns out Japan is an island on the opposite side of the largest continent in the world. Apparently, though, there wouldn't be too much problem deploying 5,000 miles away for every operation we might have to engage in, though. I'm guessing John Murtha's not too keen on gas conservation

[edit on 6/21/06/21 by junglejake]