Two Quotes of The Week on Iraq

First, from Congressman John Murtha:

[President Bush] continues to mis-characterize linking terrorism with insurgency. There's no connection between the U.S. Cole incident and Iraq. There's no connection between 9/11 and terrorism and Iraq. And there's no connection between the embassy attacks and terrorism...or Iraq, rather. Let me separate, and I've said this over and over again. You've got to separate terrorism from the insurgency. Terrorism started in Afghanistan. Terrorism...we attacked Afghanistan. Everybody supported what we did in Afghanistan. The world supported what we did in Afghanistan. And we went into Afghanistan, and started to clean up. Then, we diverted our attention to Iraq, where there was no terrorism before, no terrorist camps, no nuclear weapons, no biological/chemical weapons, and none of the things that took us to war. We go to war because of our national security interests. We don't go to war to start a democracy in another country.

Now Mark Steyn, in response:

Well, If I was the Republican Party, I'd be praying they keep that guy on TV every minute of the day, because he's a classic example of how the Democrats have got themselves on the wrong side of history. And I don't care whether he was...did a great job in the last war. I don't care, anymore than I would've cared about the fact that in the second World War, Marshall Petain had done a great job in the first world war. It's important that you're on the right side of the war we're fighting now. And if he is saying that Zarqawi blowing up weddings in Amman, Jordan, and Zarqawi's guys blowing up buses in shopping markets in Iraq isn't terrorism, he's on the wrong side, not just of the Iraqi people, but of the Sunni people. The fact of the matter is now, the so-called insurgency, the so-called holdouts against Iraqi democracy, come down to basically these buffoons from the Democratic Party...shame on them, because they have nothing constructive to offer...these buffoons from the Democratic Party, and Zarqawi and his suicide bomber goons. Zarqawi and his idiots, his death cult idiots, are walking the walk. And this ridiculous fellow Murtha is talking the talk. But shame on them. They're regarded as a party that's weak and pitiful on national security, because they got the last twenty years of the Cold War wrong. And they're making the same mistake all over again.

The whole interview took place on Hugh Hewitt's show yesterday and is available on Radioblogger.