Iraq insurgency in 'last throes,' Cheney says
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The insurgency in Iraq is "in the last throes," Vice President Dick Cheney says, and he predicts that the fighting will end before the Bush administration leaves office.
In a wide-ranging interview Monday on CNN's "Larry King Live," Cheney cited the recent push by Iraqi forces to crack down on insurgent activity in Baghdad and reports that the most-wanted terrorist leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had been wounded.
The vice president said he expected the war would end during President Bush's second term, which ends in 2009.
"I think we may well have some kind of presence there over a period of time," Cheney said. "The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."
Cheney was among the Bush administration's most forceful advocates of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Bush, Cheney and other top officials said war was necessary because Iraq was maintaining illicit stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and concealing a nuclear weapons program from U.N. weapons inspectors and could have provided those weapons to terrorists.
No banned weapons were found after U.S. troops deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's government, though U.S. inspectors said Iraq was concealing some weapons-related research from the United Nations.
Nevertheless, Cheney said he was "absolutely convinced we did the right thing in Iraq." He said the United States was making "major progress" in Iraq, where a transitional government took power in April and was working on drafting a new constitution.
Original bullshit reported here.
DICKHEAD CHENEY NOW:
US will not leave allies before success: Cheney
WASHINGTON: US allies helping in fighting terrorism — Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Egypt — must have confidence that the United States will not leave before a successful outcome, Vice President Dick Cheney said on Sunday.
Cheney said the US must show it had the “stomach” to win in Iraq or it would confirm Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden’s view that Americans could be pressured to leave. Cheney defended the plan put forward last week by President George W Bush to send 21,500 additional troops to Iraq and said critics had not produced an alternative proposal.
“If the US doesn’t have the stomach to finish the task in Iraq, we put at risk what we’ve done in all of those other locations,” he said on “Fox News Sunday”.
Bin Laden’s strategy is to push US presence out of the region through terrorism, and Iraq is currently at the centre of that battle, Cheney said. “It’s absolutely essential that we win there, and we will win there,” he said.
Cheney said while Democrats have criticised Bush’s plan and advocated withdrawal, they have not offered an alternative in its place. “I have yet to hear a coherent policy out of the Democratic side with respect to an alternative to what the president’s proposed in terms of going forward,” Cheney said.
He dismissed public opinion polls that show increasing dissatisfaction with US involvement in the Iraq war and said the president did not conduct policy based on those polls. “You cannot simply stick your finger up in the wind and say gee public opinion’s against, we better quit,” Cheney said. If the president did that, it would just “validate the Al Qaeda view of the world,” he said. Cheney said Iran had created tensions throughout the region by pursuing nuclear weapons, supporting extremists, and providing improvised explosive devices inside Iraq. “It’s been pretty well known that Iran is fishing in troubled waters, if you will, inside Iraq, and the president has responded to that,” he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment