As Bugs Bunny would say: "what a maroon!"
What a maroon!
Doesn't this man know we're reducing the number of Okinawa Marines ?
Oh he means OkainawArabia- an island off of Camel Hump! ya see! It's real close to Iraq (/sarcasm)
Looks like Murtha is helping the Irey campaign with video soundbites! She can just let the man speak for himself.
Why would Okinawa want to attack iraq?............
Scotty could beam them over.
Wouldn't Okinawa a staging point for fighters if we had to, say, defend Thailand from China? I think that the need to fly over Indian airspace with the fighters and refuel craft in order to cross that great of a distance to react to anything coming at us from the Middle East just doesn't seem so smart. Does the Rep. own a globe.
Murtha must have failed geography. What a tool.
There's no fool like an old fool. Murtha is 100% proof.
Last week... Nasty Pelosi gave almost the exact, same non-answer. The number of “you know(s)” popping up in their retorts is starting to get scary.
If allowed to regain power... these cowards will kill us all!
Distance from Okinawa to Baghdad 4899 Miles
Cruising speed F-16 577 mph
Elapsed time-Best Case 8.5 hours
Yup, that's a brilliant idea! What kind of morons elect mental midgets like this?
Murtha wants our fighters to fly to Baghdad from Okinawa? OK, an F-16 has a combat radius of 340 miles on a hi-lo-hi mission with six 1,000 lb bombs (according to Wikipedia). It's 4,899 miles as the crow flies from Okinawa to Baghdad. Do the math, Murtha.
Murtha's not just a backstabber, he's an idiot.
John al-Murtha is truly now Bozo the Clown. If this Okinawa crap does not remove his unwarranted reputation as a military sage then nothing will.....
(1) Okinawa is not only 4500 miles away "as the crow flies" but there's the inconvenient fact that the vastness of China falls in the middle of that - so in reality planes have to go completely around the Asian continent, probably close to 8000 miles (since it's rather unlikely that even friendlier India would want US military flights overhead).
(2) The US is in the midst of an agreed upon multi-year plan to slash the number of Marines based in Okinawa in half, since it has been a huge political problem with Japan's government to deal with local opposition to our bases. The idea that we could suddenly decide ("unilaterally" it appears) to trash that agreement and pour 100,000 or more troops in there, plus entire air wings, simply does not meet the "laugh test."
(3) Okinawa is not just "over the horizon" for rapid deployment purposes, it is almost 1/3 of the way around the globe (when you take account of the circuitous route that planes and ships would have to follow). The idea that a major redeployment of forces from Iraq to Okinawa could occur at all, or that it could continue to support security on the ground in Iraq in any major way, is simply laughable.
That's not to say that we can't always deploy some limited "rapid response" forces from anywhere in the world to Iraq, but the idea of using Okinawa bases to address the strategic and operational issues in Iraq is what is just plain silly.
Murtha deserves to be flayed for his Okinawa proposal, for it shows that he has no understanding of the issues involved and no plausible ideas about what to do next.
I'm floored by Murtha's response, however: "Wax on, wax off."
As someone pointed out on one of the sites linked by Michelle, Okinawa to Iraq is 5000 miles over mostly unfriendly territory (eg, China), while Maine to Iraq is 5500 miles over mostly friendly territory (except for a corner of Syria). Tomorrow, Murtha's "better idea" will be to redeploy the troops to Maine; Maine can use the boost to its economy.
If I were russert, my response to murtha's idiotic statement would have been, "Huh?"
