Murtha must really have a screw loose

I learned from Powerline that Murtha's latest statement about Iraq goes along these lines:

If they'd have kept the French here after 1776 . . . we'd have thrown them out. And that's what I say about what's happening in Iraq right now. The Iraqis are not against democracy. They're against our occupation.

Think about the huge errors in that statement: First, the French, in the person of Lafayette, didn't even join in the fighting until 1777, so there were no French to hang about in 1776. And it was only in 1779, after Lafayette's importunings, that the French government itself sent troops over. Second, the Americans were losing up until practically the last minutes of 1776 so, if the French had been there helping them, the Americans would never have asked them to leave. Third, combat didn't wrap up until 1783, when Cornwallis formally surrendered so, again, the Americans would have been crazy to ask joint combatants to leave. With the insurgents fighting away, America is in that situation vis a vis its Iraqi allies. Some battles may have been won, but it's not over, and the Iraqis, no fools they, know that they'd be crazy to ask the Americans to leave them to the insurgents' tender mercies. In other words, if Murtha had come even close to historical accuracy, he would have seen that the Revolutionary War/French analogy perfectly supports America's decision to stay the course in Iraq and help the Iraqis realize true freedom.