Melanie Morgan is one of those grade B talk show hosts that's treated like the almighty when she appears on Teevee. On Hardball Friday--she proves what she has to say is downright insane and immoral in defending the war supporters position on Iraq. The bookers of 24/7 don't seem to share my opinion.
MORGAN: I think that…yeah, we should have a lot more troops in the beginning. Look, I’m not a cheerleader for the President of the United States. Um, I…I believe that he made the right decision and he did it for the right reasons. I don’t agree with all of the way the war has been prosecuted. I think we should have gone in and just blitzed Iraq. We haven’t had a, a serious war, really, since WWII. We’ve had…
MATTHEWS: What would that mean, blitz?
MORGAN: It would have…it means that we should have gone in and be prepared to win it, not just to do…to avoid collateral damage. And I think that’s one of the mistakes that uh, this administration has made…
Morgan is the typical warmonger who believes we should "kill'em all."--vaporize every living person without regard to human life---even though Iraq never attacked us. (She's also quite comfortable with torture,) Morgan has no idea how many casualties there are in Iraq because she doesn't want to know. And by the way---I believe Korea and Vietnam ware serious wars. I gather so do the men and women who fought in them. I'm just saying...
(full transcript below the fold)
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about the American voter out there. The numbers are shifting against the war, we all know that, for better or worse. They’re moving towards something like 60% who believe we should not have gone to war. What is your party, the Republicans, those who believe in this war, what can they say now between the election day to stop that slippage in support?
MORGAN: I have to say…they have to say, “Look, what’s the alternative? Are we just going to leave Iraq, pack up our guns, our Humvees, and our kids and come home and leave that to um, to the people of, of Iraq, the jihadists and the terrorists and the sectarian violence? I don’t think so. We need to honor the deaths already of almost 3,000 young men, because if, if we don’t, we’re going to have some serious problems in keeping our military forces motivated in the future, and we would be dishonoring their deaths if we did. We also need to think about what’s going to happen with Iran, Jordan and Syria…
MATTHEWS: Do you like saying…like John McCain was on this week, saying we need to 100,000 more troops over there to win this war. What do you think?
MORGAN: I think that’s probably right…
MATTHEWS: More troops?
MORGAN: I think that…yeah, we should have a lot more troops in the beginning. Look, I’m not a cheerleader for the President of the United States. Um, I…I believe that he made the right decision and he did it for the right reasons. I don’t agree with all of the way the war has been prosecuted. I think we should have gone in and just blitzed Iraq. We haven’t had a, a serious war, really, since WWII. We’ve had…
MATTHEWS: What would that mean, blitz?
MORGAN: It would have…it means that we should have gone in and be prepared to win it, not just to do…to avoid collateral damage. And I think that’s one of the mistakes that uh, this administration has made…
MATTHEWS: How many Iraqis do you figure have been killed so far?
MORGAN: I have no idea…because there are figures all over the map, Chris. I mean, it depends on who’s doing the survey and asking the questions….
MATHEWS: What do you hear from the administration?
MORGAN: I am not hearing from the administration. I’m not in close contact with them.
MATTHEWS: Well, they’re saying something like 50…and the, the other experts are saying 600,000, so it’s probably in the low 100,000s, if you take a middle position. You think that’s not enough violence over there?
MORGAN: I didn’t say that…
MATTHEWS: You said, “blitz” and “don’t worry about collateral damage” …
MORGAN: I said in the very beginning…when we came in…we needed to win, we needed to use our, our guns, and we needed to use our superior air forces and we needed to win. We didn’t choose that strategy…
MATTHEWS: Wasn’t the problem…I don’t know about that….wasn’t the problem that the army that was supposed to face us in the field sort of melted back into the cities? Took off their uniforms and disappeared. So who would we have fought? I remember—we all remember—those first couple of weeks, it was relatively calm, the statues were coming down. I thought then I was wrong all along, the president was right. For a couple of weeks, I thought “God, he was right. It is going to be easy; they do want us to come in as liberators,” and then it began to slowly creep back. All the people in the military on the other side, with their uniforms gone, start building IEDs.
MORGAN: Because, we got…
MATTHEWS: And then all of the sudden, Shi’a militia took over and they started fighting . [gestures to Hilary Rosen] and you’ll get in here, we saw how this thing evolved.
MORGAN: We did see it. We all saw it together. What we did not do, which is what we should have done was in Ramadi and Fallujah, we should have gone in and killed the enemy.
MATTHEWS: Who?
[crosstalk]
MORGAN: They killed, the jihadists who were there….
MATTHEWS: We can only fight people if they fight you. How do you figure out who the enemy is unless they’re fighting you?
MORGAN: They were fighting us at the time, in the very beginning of the war and instead, we let them slip into the shadows…
ROSEN: No, that’s wrong…
MORGAN: Yes, it is right…
ROSEN: And the reason I wasn’t talking is because I think the more that they keep doing this, the American people aren’t buying it, and so, let them talk themselves forever. We were going in and toppling Saddam Hussein’s army. When we let the army go, they became a bunch of angry, disaffected soldiers, who joined—loosely--with terrorists in other countries and all of the sudden, terrorists came into Iraq to see this as a potential opportunity to fight the Americans. That’s what happened. We weren’t going in there to fight al Qaeda. Al Qaeda wasn’t in Iraq…
MORGAN: Oh yes, al Qaeda WAS in Iraq…
ROSEN: There’s no evidence that al Qaeda and Iraq was actually connected to this…
MORGAN: There IS evidence. There’s plenty…(stammers)
MATTHEWS: Well, Zarqawi was there.
MORGAN: Yeah…
ROSEN: Well, Zarqawi…
MATTHEWS: I don’t know if was a force. And by the way, the best military estimate so far, only 5% of people we’re fighting right now are terrorists. The president was very clear in his press conference this week. We’ve faced problems with the militias from the Shi’a neighborhoods. We got the insurgent holdouts, the old Ba’athists fighting us from the Sunni areas and we got this other element called the ‘terrorists.’ The president was very honest about that. And the question is, how big a problem are the terrorists, even today? Are we really sitting in the middle of two big forces, the Sunni and the Shi’a, and the terrorist are sitting out there, ready to exploit the situation? The question is, when can we finish the job? We’ll be back with Hilary Rosen and Melanie Morgan…