Rumsfeld: Insurgency could last 5 to 12 years
Also, new poll says more Americans now blame Bush for Iraq war than Saddam Hussein.
As part of a
public relations campaign leading up to President Bush addressing the nation Tuesday night about the war in Iraq, members of the Bush administration have been trying to downplay the strength of the insurgency in Iraq.
But on Sunday US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave the first indication Sunday that some members of the Bush administration recognize that the insurgency may not be in its "last throes," as Vice President Dick Cheney said recently. Mr. Rumsfeld told
Fox News Sunday: "Insurgencies tend to go on
five, six, eight, 10, 12 years."
"Coalition forces, foreign forces, are not going to repress that insurgency. We're going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win against that insurgency."
Mr. Rumsfeld warned that violence could escalate ahead of new elections for a permanent government, due in December.
When asked to comment on Rumsfeld's remarks, Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari said it was
impossible to predict how long it would take to defeat the insurgents. "Politics is not mathematics,"
Reuters reports he told a conference in London.
The admission came two days after General John Abizaid, commander of US forces in the Persian Gulf, told a Congressional hearing that the insurgents in Iraq
are just as strong today as they were six months ago, and that more foreign fighters are coming into the country than in past months.
On June 20 in an interview with Larry King on
CNN a week ago, Mr. Cheney used the phrase "in the last throes" to describe
the state of the insurgency. After Gen. Abizaid's remarks on Friday, Mr. Cheney refused to alter his original comments, saying
it all depends what "last throes" means, and that it could mean a long, not short, violent period.
Greg Mitchell, the editor of
EditorandPublisher.com, writes that the vice president is
starting to sound too much like "Baghdad Bob," the much ridiculed spokesman for Saddam Hussein in the run up to the second Iraq war.
Yesterday, after a week of serious criticism, for claiming that the insurgency in Iraq was in its "last throes," Cheney refused to back down, even after Gen. John Abizaid, our top military commander for the Middle East, proclaimed that the insurgency, in fact, was as strong as ever, and 'a lot of work' remained to be done to defeat it. Earlier this week, GOP Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska had said he was sick of sunny assertions about the war from the White House, and declared that the US indeed might be losing, not on the edge of victory ... Is it time to start calling him "D.C. Dick"? Or "Baghdad Dick"? Or perhaps "Bunker Bob"?
Writing in
The Christian Science Monitor, however, Max Boot, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, cautions that "lest we build up the enemy into 10-foot-tall supermen, it's important to realize
how weak they are."
The biggest weakness of the insurgency is that it is morphing from a war of national liberation into a revolutionary struggle against an elected government. That's a crucial difference. Since 1776, wars of national liberation have usually succeeded because nationalism is such a strong force. Revolutions against despots, from the Shah of Iran to the autocrats of Eastern Europe, often succeed, too, because there is no way to redress grievances within the political process. Successful uprisings against elected governments are much rarer, however, because leaders with political legitimacy can more easily rally the population and accommodate aggrieved elements. The
BBC reports that the Bush administration is "
worried by the rising casualties, the ongoing insurgency and waning domestic support."
A
Washington Post/ABC News poll published Monday shows that a large majority of Americans
do not believe the insurgency in Iraq is weakening, despite Cheney's comments. The survey found that 24 percent of Americans actually believe the insurgency is getting stronger, while 53 percent say its level has not changed. Only 23 percent of Americans felt is was weakening.
Meanwhile, a Rasmussen poll published Friday found that "Forty-nine percent of Americans say that President Bush is
more responsible for starting the war with Iraq than Saddam Hussein ... 44% take the opposite view and believe Hussein shoulders most of the responsibility."
Rumsfeld told
Fox News Sunday that the tries not to put too much meaning into public opinion polls about Iraq.
Columnist Gary Younge writes in the
Guardian that it's
not the rising casualty rate that upsets Americans the most.
The critical factor driving this slump [in public support], explains Christopher Gelpi, associate professor of political science at Duke University who specialises in public attitudes to foreign policy, is not how many soldiers they lose but whether the mission for which they have fallen is likely to be successful. "The most important single fact is that the public perceive the mission as being destined for success. The American public is partly casualty-phobic but it is primarily defeat phobic. You can muster support for just about any military operation in the US so long as you can get enough of the defeat-phobic people on board."
CNN reports that Abizaid
asked the American people not to give up on the war during a TV appearance on "Late Edition."
"This is not a quagmire," he said. "It is a marathon, and we're at about the 21st mile." Abizaid appealed for public support of the soldiers and their mission. "We don't need to fight this war looking over our shoulder worrying about the support back home," he told "Late Edition." And Pakistani news channel
GEO-TV reports that Abizaid said that US forces are
close to finding Al Qaeda's front man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. "I think we have a good idea" of where to find him, Abizaid told US news channel. "We know what we're doing in our efforts how to get him," he said.
Also...
•
Islamic law controls the streets of Basra (
LA Times)
•
Former Israeli soldier guilty of shooting Briton (
BBC)
•
Report: US abusing material witness statute (
CNN
•
Blair says international community will not 'go soft' on Iran (
Forbes)
•
Chinese 'threat' grips America (
Financial Express)
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Tom Regan
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