Cheney Calls Insurgency Difficult.

Vice President Dick Cheney on Sept. 10 admitted that the insurgency in Iraq had proved tougher than anticipated. When challenged on his depiction last year of the insurgency as in its last throes, Cheney on NBC-TV said: "The insurgency has gone on longer and been more difficult than I had anticipated. I'll be the first to admit that". Still, he said 2005, with the developments it brought for a nascent Iraqi democracy, would prove to be a positive turning point for Iraq. Cheney spoke on the eve of the fifth anniversary of 9/11 (see news12-TerrorWar-Sep18-06).

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sept. 10 said Taliban forces in Afghanistan were more persistent than expected. After the initial US assault in late 2001 ousted them from power, she said, "They came back somewhat more organized and somewhat more capable than we would have expected". But Cheney said he remained convinced that invading Iraq was "absolutely" the right thing to do. Because Saddam was a dangerous threat to the region, Cheney asserted, he would have urged precisely the same course even if he had known that Iraq had no WMD. Rice, like Cheney, appeared intent on underscoring US progress against terrorism since 9/11. On Fox-TV, she said: "I think it's clear that we are safe, safer, but not really yet safe, and we've done a lot. In terms of the homeland, we're more secure, our ports are more secure, our airports are more secure. We have a much stronger intelligence-sharing operation, not just within the country".

Cheney said while Americans understandably were concerned about setbacks in the war on terror, they needed to keep in mind a bottom-line fact: "I don't know how you can explain five years of no attacks, five years of successful disruption of attacks, five years of defeating efforts of al-Qaeda to come back and kill more Americans. You've got to give some credence to the notion that maybe somebody did something right".

Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic candidate for president in 2004, was one of several Democrats who spoke out on security issues. On Sept. 10, he criticised the administration, telling CNN: "We are safer in small ways, but we are not as safe as we ought to be after 9/11. There are more terrorists in the world today who want to kill Americans". He contended that the administration, by focusing rhetorically on the terror threat, wanted to "scare Americans". Turning an administration charge against it, Kerry said it was the White House which wanted to "cut and run" from Afghanistan, devoting too few resources to it despite rising violence. But Cheney attributed that violence to a Taliban effort to test the NATO troops who have taken over in southern Afghanistan from Americans. Cheney said: "There was a belief that NATO wouldn't fight as aggressively as US forces". He and Rice asserted that NATO had proved the Taliban wrong. Rice said: "They're learning a very brutal lesson".

Cheney disagreed with the 54% of Americans who told a New York Times/CBS poll the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan was creating more terrorists. And of a CNN survey which found 53% believed Iraq was not part of the fight on terror, he said: "I beg to differ". Cheney, who offers the media few opportunities to talk, faced a series of tough questions in the NBC interview - about his statement that "we'll be greeted as liberators" in Iraq; his observation in May 2005 that the insurgency there was in its "last throes"; and about the failure to find WMD. He said Iraq, the region and the world would have been in far worse shape had Saddam been left in power, adding: "If we had it to do over again we'd do exactly the same thing".

Thomas Kean, a Republican who was a co-chairman of the 9/11 commission, said on ABC-TV he thought there was no doubt the Iraq war had raised dangers for the region. He said: "There's no question the war in Iraq is radicalizing people in that area. If it becomes, as it seems to becoming, a civil war, that civil war could spread outside the boundaries of Iraq to other areas. It's a very dangerous situation. And in that kind of a situation, in that area, that's where terror likes to breed".

Cheney sharply disagreed with a headline in The Washington Post that the hunt for bin Laden had gone "stone cold", saying: "We've stayed actively and aggressively involved in the hunt for Osama bin Laden". But he noted that the terrorist problem had grown far more decentralised and diffuse, saying: "If you killed him tomorrow, you'd still have a problem with al-Qaeda". In looking back to the situation as the administration saw it before the Iraq war, Cheney again said a terrorist group which had been able to obtain a nuclear device from a friendly government could have inflicted catastrophic damage in an American city. He said: "You'd have been looking at a casualty toll that would rival all the deaths in all the wars fought by America in 230 years".