The Turning Point

We lost, get over it before more young men and women have to die for a lost cause.

Murtha said in full public view that the pottery is broken and it cannot be fixed. There is only one rational response, he said: prepare for a pull-out of the troops before too many more of them die in a lost cause. He said this as a decorated military figure who has always voted for military expenditures.

This was a major turnaround. This is what turning points are, by definition. Murtha will be seen by historians as the turning point of this war. He is just too tempting a figure for historians to ignore. He will become in retrospect the Tet Offensive of the Iraq War.