Walz criticizes Bush’s handling of war

08/31/2006

By RON LARSEN
The Journal, Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Democrat veterans Tim Walz of Minnesota and Eric Massa of New York joined a former Democratic National Committee chairman in assailing President Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq Wednesday.

Walz, who is seeking the First District Congressional seat now held by Republican Gil Gutknecht, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Massa in claiming the Bush administration, as well as Republicans in both houses of Congress, has failed to keep promises made to America’s veterans to bring them home. The trio spoke during a 25-minute, tele-news conference with reporters.

Massa, who is seeking New York’s 29th Congressional District seat for the first time, said the conduct of the war by the Bush administration has been “an assault upon our soldiers. The president can no longer use the military as a prop for his political goals [in the region].”

The Iraq war has been especially hard upon National Guard soldiers over in Iraq because “four in 10 National Guard soldiers lose income while they’re on active duty,” Walz said.

He claimed that use of the National Guard to help fight the war in Iraq has seriously weakened the nation’s ability to defend itself against aggressors here at home.

“We want National Guard soldiers brought home. We want true national security here at home,” Walz said.

“The Bush administration’s war effort was a failure right from the beginning,” and only by electing Democrats to gain control of one or both houses of Congress can the failure be corrected,” former Democratic National Committee Chairman Don Fowler said.

“I think the facts speak for themselves. It’s very difficult when you’re trying to get a macro image of an entire country, make no mistake about it, when you put an American soldier, sailor or marine on the ground, they’re going to do good work,” Walz said.

“It doesn’t change the fact at the macro level and the facts coming in that there’s an absolute failure of this. I think pointing to when the president said that major combat operations were done, we had less than 19 attacks a day. Now, we’re well over 90,” Walz said.

“The facts are pretty clear. The number of people that are getting killed; the number of attacks on United States forces are pretty clear. For him to say that, once again, it’s simply trying to sell us a war, sell us their theory on this, and if the Democrats are asking for a new course or a new plan on this, we are not supportive of this,” Walz said.

“That’s ridiculous. What we are is we are anti-failure people. What we want to see is this thing fixed.”