What a difference a year makes, OR NOT! One year ago Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that the Iraqi insurgency was “in its last throes” and predicted that fighting in Iraq would end before the Bush administration leaves office.
Well, Vice was wrong (again). Are you surpised? This is the same man who was certain that Saddam Hussein had “reconstituted” his nuclear weapons program. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have been wrong about EVERYTHING concerning the Iraq war, and THEY CONTINUE TO BE WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING REGARDING THE WAR IN IRAQ.
Americans can follow the Fool Bush, The Deceiver Cheney, and the brilliant-incompetent Rumsfeld further into the quagmire, but the price will be high. Don’t complain about higher oil prices, inflation, a weaker dollar, a national security state, loss of privacy, a lower standard of living, and lost American greatness.
Iraq insurgency in ‘last throes,’ Cheney says
One year later the Pentagon has a different assessment of the insurgency in Iraq:
Pentagon: Iraq Insurgency Steady Until ’07
Pentagon: Iraq Insurgency Steady Until ’07
Associated Press
May 30, 2006By ROBERT BURNS – The Sunni Arab heart of the Iraqi insurgency seems likely to hold its strength the rest of the year, and some of its leaders are now collaborating with al-Qaida terrorists, the Pentagon said Tuesday.
In a report assessing the situation in Iraq, required quarterly by Congress, the Pentagon painted a mixed picture on a day when the U.S. military command in Baghdad said 1,500 more combat troops have arrived in the country. The extra troops are part of an intensified effort to wrest control of the provincial capital of Ramadi from insurgents.
The report to Congress offered a relatively dim picture of economic progress, with few gains in improving basic services like electricity, and it provided no promises of U.S. troop reductions anytime soon.
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‘MNF-I expects that rejectionist strength will likely remain steady throughout 2006, but that their appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007,’ the report said. The term MNF-I refers to the Multinational Force-Iraq, the top American military command in Baghdad.
It also said for the first time that the Sunnis who reject the U.S.-based government are collaborating with al-Qaida.
‘Some hardline Sunni rejectionists have joined al-Qaida in Iraq in recent months, increasing the terrorists’ attack options,’ the report said.
It said a separate element of the insurgency that U.S. officials describe as former loyalists of the Saddam Hussein regime remains an important enabler of the violence in Iraq. But the Saddam loyalists have ‘mostly splintered’ into other groups. As a result, they are now ‘largely irrelevant’ as a threat to the fledgling Iraqi government, said Lt. Gen. Victor E. Renuart, the head of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who helped prepare the report.
The report also said that while security in much of Iraq has improved, total attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces have increased in recent months, following the Feb. 22 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra.
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The troop move announced Tuesday involves about 1,500 soldiers from an armored brigade on standby in Kuwait and reflects a deteriorating security situation in the volatile provincial capital of Ramadi.
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Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq watcher with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Tuesday there is no clear basis for believing U.S. troop levels can be reduced anytime soon without risking further deterioration in the security situation.
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‘I think, in honesty, that now looks a lot more like 2007 at the earliest (for) really having serious reductions in the U.S. combat role (and) being certain that the U.S. casualty levels are going down on a lasting basis and being able to reduce the costs of the war,’ Cordesman said in a telephone interview.
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A third battalion from the brigade in Kuwait was sent to Baghdad in March as part of a broader plan to improve security in the capital during the formation of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s new cabinet. That cabinet was announced and put in place more than a week ago but still lacks ministers of defense and interior, who control the Iraqi army and police. Whitman said that battalion is still operating in the Baghdad area.
