Rumsfeld: Insurgency could last 5 to 12 years

Also, new poll says more Americans now blame Bush for Iraq war than Saddam
Hussein.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

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.

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