FrontPage magazine.com :: Osama's Congressman by Ben Johnson: "On “Meet the Press” Sunday, John Murtha endorsed al-Qaeda’s foreign policy.The upwardly mobile, cut-and-run specialist (who, by the way, is a “war hero”) told Tim Russert he still supports the foreign policy that convinced Osama bin Laden to launch the 9/11 attacks:
Now, the other day we were doing a debate, and [the Republicans] said, “Well, Beirut was a different situation. We cut and run.” We didn’t cut and run. President Reagan made the decision to change direction because he knew he couldn’t win it. Even in Somalia, President Clinton made the decision, “We have to, we have to change direction…need to change direction. We can’t win a war like this.”
Murtha revealed we must take this step days after the death of al-Zarqawi, because we’re “losing”:And if you’re not winning, if you’re losing, and that’s what’s happening…[A]t some point you got to reassess it like Reagan did in, in Beirut, like, like Clinton did in Somalia, you just have to say, “OK, it’s time to change direction.”Murtha’s was an unfortunate choice of historical precedent. As the Washington Post has reported,
“As examples of alleged American cowardice, bin Laden frequently cites the case of the withdrawal from Lebanon after the 1983 truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the withdrawal from Somalia after the 1993 killings of U.S. servicemen in Mogadishu.” read more 
