Rumsfeld: US not losing Iraq war

[eek.]

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Rumsfeld defended the administration's policies in Iraq

</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!-- E IIMA -->Donald Rumsfeld has said the US is not losing the Iraq war and it would be a mistake to set a timetable for American troops to leave the country.

To set a deadline would "send a lifeline to terrorists", he told House and Senate committees.

But the US top Gulf commander General John Abizaid told the same Senate committee more foreign fighters were coming into Iraq than six months ago.

The hearings come amid waning public support in the US for the war.

'Damascus focus'

A series of bombings in Iraq late on Wednesday and early on Thursday killed at least 30 people in Baghdad, while a recent opinion poll showed that 51% of Americans now think the invasion two years ago was a mistake.

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I would say there is a clear node inside Syria which facilitates [the entering of insurgents]"

General Abizaid, Gulf commander

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"I believe there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago," Gen Abizaid told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

He said suicide bombers from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco were entering Iraq via Syria, joining others from Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

"I would say there is a clear node inside Syria which facilitates it. Whether or not the Syrian government is facilitating it or ignoring it is probably a debatable question, but the key node is Damascus," he said.

Democrat Senator Carl Levin has suggested that the view is at odds with Vice-President Cheney's view that the insurgency was in its last throes.

Need for patience

A small bipartisan group in Congress has proposed a resolution calling on President George W Bush to start bringing home US troops from Iraq by 1 October 2006.

But Mr Rumsfeld said that timing in war was not predictable and there were no guarantees.

"And any who say that we've lost this war, or that we're losing this war are wrong. We are not," he told senators.

Setting a date for withdrawal would "send a lifeline to terrorists", he said. Insurgents "have suffered significant losses in casualties, been denied havens, and suffered weakened popular support" in recent months, he added.

</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>There was still a way to go, he said, but progress was being made.



"Success will not be easy and it will require patience... But consider what has been accomplished in 12 months," he said, mentioning the elections in January, economic improvements, and improvements in Iraq's security force.

Democrat Senator Edward Kennedy said that Mr Rumsfeld's predictions had been wrong in the past and repeated calls for him to resign.

But Mr Rumsfeld was backed by Gen Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who told the panel that "leaving before the task is complete would be catastrophic".

The US has 135,000 troops in Iraq. The Pentagon says it has trained and equipped some 168,500 Iraqi police and military personnel.

However, the continuing violence had led some US commanders to scale back optimistic predictions that US troop numbers could be reduced any time soon, says the BBC's diplomatic correspondent, Jonathan Marcus. And while Iraq's new security forces are growing in number, their effectiveness remains very much in doubt, our correspondent adds.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4123808.stm

 

[docmercer--banned]

Rumsfeld also predicted the Lakers would reach the NBA Finals and that Jennifer Anniston would be married to Brad Pitt for 10 yrs ...

 

[Phaedrus]

I loved Abizaid's comments on Cheney's assertion that the insurgency was in it's "last throes." Even more amusing was Cheney's response when prodded about Abizaid's comments:

"If you look at what the dictionary says about throes, it can still be a violent period, the throes of a revolution."

In other words, Cheney said "How do you define the word 'is'?"

LMAO

Phaedrus

 

[Marco]

Rummy claims we're winning....

Gulf commander Abizaid claims there are more dudes pouring in than 6 months ago....

Hmmmm.....if we were winning maybe there'd be LESS of them to fight?

Did somebody else babble this crap about winning 2 years into Vietnam also?

 

[DrRubberfunk]

With Bush stating that the US wasn't going to pull any time soon, IMO it is going to turn into another Vietnam. No winners but 2 losers. The US soldiers and their families, and the Iraqi people. :sad3:

Rumsfeld and the Bush admin (and Blair and his cronnies) have made some fricking massive lies to both the US and British people. What has been achieved? What was found? Freaking nothing! How many more have to die before Bush et al do the only right thing and PULL OUT?

 

[Phaedrus]

Welcome to the Newspeak Publishing Company.

"Final Throes!" -- years of bloodshed to come, six, eight, ten, twelve, who knows.

"We're Not Losing!" -- we aren't going to win, but winning isn't what we're there to do.

U.S. says Iraqis may fight rebels for years

By Alastair Macdonald
(Reuters)

BAGHDAD -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Sunday that American forces would not defeat Iraq's rebels but would make way for Iraqis to put down an insurgency that could go on for a decade or more.

His remarks came on another day of bloodshed in which three suicide attacks around the northern city of Mosul killed more than two dozen people, highlighting the task faced by Iraq's U.S.-trained forces in overcoming a Sunni Arab revolt, backed by foreign Islamists, against the new Shi'ite-led government.

"That insurgency can go on for any number of years," Rumsfeld told Fox News.

"Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years. 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."

In the space of a few hours a suicide car bomber wrecked a police headquarters, an attack on an Iraqi army base killed at least 15 people and four police were killed when a bomber walked into Mosul's General Hospital and blew himself up.

The third attack, on a police post inside the hospital, damaged the emergency ward where casualties had been brought from the previous incidents. Six policemen and nine civilians were wounded, police told a Reuters reporter at the scene.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the assault on the hospital but the earlier two bombings were claimed by al Qaeda's Iraq wing, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

In Baghdad, six policemen were killed by a suicide bomber as they were pulling into their base, police said. The deputy head of a city police department was also assassinated.

Handover

Handing over to Iraqi forces and withdrawing the U.S. army that invaded to topple
Saddam Hussein two years ago is a key policy for
President Bush as opinion polls show Americans turning against a project that many believed would rapidly produce a stable, pro-Washington government in Baghdad.

The deaths of six U.S. troops, some of them women, in a suicide bomb attack in Falluja on Thursday took the death toll above 1,730. Another soldier was killed in Baghdad on Sunday.

Rumsfeld said insurgent attacks were becoming deadlier.

The U.S. Middle East commander, General John Abizaid, said: "It's clear to me that by the ... early part of next spring next year to the summer of next year you'll see Iraqi security forces move into the lead in the counterinsurgency fight."

But, in a U.S. television interview, he added: "That doesn't mean that I'm saying we'll come home by then."

The insurgency appears driven partly by fears among some in Saddam's formerly dominant Sunni Arab minority that they will lose out in an Iraq run by a Shi'ite majority government. It has drawn support from foreign Arabs, most of whom are Sunnis, who want to wage holy war against the West and the Shi'ites.

U.S. commanders say Iraqi forces will need their support for a long time. The strength of Sunni rebels has raised concerns that they could sorely test troops fielded by any Shi'ite- and Kurdish-dominated government in a civil war.

The Mosul car bomber drove at a police headquarters at Bab al-Toob in the city center, striking a rear wall to bring down a section of the old, two-storey building and devastate surrounding market stalls as people started the working day.

Five police and a civilian were killed and 14 people were wounded, hospital staff said. A U.S. military spokesman put the death toll as high as 13 police and two civilians killed.

The Defense Ministry said a suicide bomber killed 15 people and wounded 15, mostly civilians, at an army post at Kasak, near Mosul. The U.S. spokesman put the dead at 16. Soldiers turned the bomber away from the base and he walked instead among a crowd of civilians, the Defense Ministry said in a statement.

Medical staff in Mosul said most of the casualties were building workers from the base. Kasak is near the violent town of Tal Afar, where locals reported heavy fighting on Saturday.

U.S. troops have been fighting in Tal Afar for weeks. U.S. commanders say foreign fighters come into the city from nearby Syria and they have been unable to stem the flow.

Bush told Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari in Washington on Friday there would be no timetable for withdrawal, despite pressure from opposition Democrats who accuse Bush of leading U.S. troops into a "quagmire" in Iraq.

He is to make a keynote speech on Iraq on Tuesday.

(Additional reporting by Randall Mikkelsen in Washington, Maher al-Thanoon in Mosul and Luke Baker, Waleed Ibrahim and Faris al-Mehdawi in Baghdad)