Paul Hackett got an interesting mention today in the Washington Times’s Inside The Beltway column:

Hackett’s plan

Politicians and military officers alike yesterday weighed in on President Bush’s insistence during a speech Tuesday night that the increasingly deadly war in Iraq is winnable.

Now, how about an opinion from a Marine and politician in one?

Paul Hackett, a 43-year-old Marine Corps major who returned from service in Iraq on March 18, has become a Democratic candidate for Congress in Ohio’s most heavily Republican district. He is the first veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom to seek a congressional seat.

“No more lip service,” Mr. Hackett said on the heels of President Bush’s address to the nation Tuesday night on Iraq. Instead, he says, the U.S. needs “a specific plan to complete the mission in Iraq.”

Which is?

“My plan is simple: Match each Iraqi unit to an American unit,” he says. “They will eat together, sleep together, train together and fight together. Our Americans will be a constant example of how professional soldiers conduct themselves.”

“By making this commitment, we can successfully exit Iraq once the roughly 140,000 Iraqi security forces are adequately trained and skilled enough to defend their government,” he continues. “I was in Iraq three months ago and we were teaching Iraqi soldiers by assigning four American advisers to a battalion of Iraqis. You would not send your kid to a school where 500 students learn from only four teachers.”

Mr. Hackett, at the same time, makes clear that the Iraqi people “are grateful that we eliminated their brutal dictator,” and cautions that while they are capable of running their own government and building a democracy, “it won’t look like ours, nor should it.”

Without naming names, he says U.S. leaders “cannot paint a rosy picture and expect us to believe it.”

“This war is wasting billions of tax dollars and countless American lives,” he says.


The Washington Times was founded by Reverend Moon in 1982. Since then it has become the gold standard of far right reporting and can be considered the precursor to Fox News.

Nice to see that Hackett is making an impression inside the beltway; at least with the Republicans ;-)