CLAPPING LOUDLY, TELLING MORE LIES, FALL 2003

It's not fair to pick on a lowly colonel (see below), so here are some excerpts from the bigger fish. (H/T to Thomas Ricks for writing about this press conference in Fiasco.)

(From: Secretary Rumsfeld Media Roundtable at Camp Victory, Iraq; September 05, 2003 )

Rumsfeld: The number of Iraqi people that are coming forward and offering information about where people are doing damage to the Iraqi people, where they are located, where the people who are sabotaging and where are the people who are criminals. That information is central to the success that we're seeing in large parts of this country.

I am enormously impressed with the work that Ambassador Bremer and the CPA, the Coalition Provisional Authority, are doing, and Ambassador Richmond. And also with the work that's being done throughout this large, complicated country, and indeed it is, for some 23 million people by General Sanchez and his team. They are making contributions to improving the lives of the Iraqi people through schools, through hospitals, through universities, through roads, through wells, all of the kinds of constructive things that change the circumstances.

And if you think about it, it happened in four or five months. Four or five months. Not four or five years. Four or five months. If one looks back at Germany, at Japan, at Bosnia or Kosovo and measures the progress that's taken place in this country in four or five months, it dwarfs any other experience that I'm aware of.

Bremer: Every day in this country there are dozens of success stories. We have now completed almost 6,000 individual reconstruction projects throughout this country. ... Schools are being rebuilt. We are rebuilding a thousand schools between now and when the school season starts in three weeks. ...Democracy is on the march in this country. And it's on the march at the grassroots level where it really matters.

The country does not have enough power today, they did not have enough power on March 19th.

...as we get Iraqis more and more involved in the police, in the army, in the civil defense corps, in the border patrol, we are going to find much more actionable intelligence coming into our hands because these terrorists are the serious ones, the al Qaeda type. They're not Iraqis. They're foreigners. Iraqis will be much better at spotting these guys and pointing the finger to them than we're going to be.

Sanchez: Mr. Secretary, ladies and gentlemen. It is very disturbing for me when I sit here every day and watch the news back home that focuses on the bad things that are occurring in Iraq, and I see my soldiers that have suffered either wounds or have gotten killed and we're not paying the right credit to their sacrifices.

When you look across this country and look at the amount of this country that is in stability operations, that is making economic progress, it is making political progress, we ought to make sure that America knows that their sons' and daughters' sacrifices are for a good cause.

I have about 160,000 servicemembers here to include the Coalition. I don't need any more forces here.

The requirement for additional U.S. forces I've stated over and over again that I do not have, as I mentioned earlier, I don't have a tactical operational, or strategic challenge here in the country. We don't need additional forces. It is not a matter of putting more boots on the ground here in Iraq. You saw today the tremendous progress that's being made in the northern half of the country.

We don't know who actually executed those bombings. What we do know is that we have different elements that are operating here in the country. We know we've got former regime loyalists, we've got Saddam Fedayeen, we've got terrorists, we've got criminals, and we have religious fundamentalists that are operating. Some foreign fighters. So it could be any of those that are conducting those types of attacks, and there could be the possibility that some of them are beginning to come together.

It's a low intensity conflict terrorist threat. It's what we're facing.