The month of August is barely a week old, and 34 of our troops have already been killed in Iraq along with dozens of Iraqi citizens. Sadly, the administration’s response was as infuriating as it was predictable, sending someone in front of a microphone to once again claim that—despite all appearances to the contrary—the Iraqi insurgency was really in its last throes. Take it away, Condoleezza Rice:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says the insurgency in Iraq is losing steam as a political force, even as Democratic congressmen warned Sunday that violence jeopardizes plans for withdrawing some troops.
(…)”It’s a lot easier to see the violence and suicide bombing than to see the rather quiet political progress that’s going on in parallel,” Rice said.
“If you think about how to defeat an insurgency, you defeat it not just militarily but politically,” she said, adding that she believes the insurgents are “losing steam” politically.
Sound familiar? It should.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday played down recent deadly attacks on Americans in Iraq, equating those losses with everyday violence in large U.S. cities.
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Asked at Pentagon press conference about the Iraqi resistance, Rumsfeld described it as “small elements” of 10 to 20 people, not large military formations or networks of attackers. He said there “is a little debate” in the administration over whether there is any central control to the resistance, which officials say is coming from Saddam Hussein’s former Baath Party, Fedayeen paramilitary, and other loyalists.
“In those regions where pockets of dead-enders are trying to reconstitute, Gen. (Tommy) Franks and his team are rooting them out,” Rumsfeld said, referring to the U.S. commander in Iraq. “In short, the coalition is making good progress.”
The top U.S. general in the Middle East said Tuesday that the failure of insurgents to prevent millions of Iraqis from voting in January showed that the violent guerrilla movement was fizzling.
GEN. [Richard] MYERS: I’m going to say this. I think we are winning. Okay? I think we’re definitely winning. I think we’ve been winning for some time. And if you pull out — if you look at the attacks, the number of attacks that we track — I think this is a poor measure of whether you’re winning or losing, by the way. So if you pick out the attacks, half of them have no effect. So when we say 60 a day, 30 had no impact on anything, meaning no building or person was damaged or injured.
Senior American officers predict that the insurgents, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant whose network has claimed responsibility for the deadliest suicide bombings, will not be able to sustain the level of attacks much longer…But these officers acknowledged that the increase in suicide bombings over the last two weeks, while possibly a last-ditch effort, had won the militants important propaganda victories by gaining worldwide news media coverage.
“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.”
Total so far: 1,833 American soldiers killed. A basically uncountable number of Iraqis killed. But keep your chin up, because—once again—the insurgents are on the run, and nothing should be made of stories like this one from last week:
A Marine Reserve company that was known as “Lucky Lima” before suffering heavy casualties in May was hit Wednesday by the deadliest roadside bombing of the Iraq war, a massive explosion that killed 14 Marines and the unit’s Iraqi interpreter, according to witnesses and military spokesmen.
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With experience, insurgents have figured out increasingly lethal ways to rig bombs, U.S. military officials say.