We’ll Take That Bet

1 June 2005



Cheney Says War in Iraq Over by 2009

Vice President Dick Cheney was on Larry King’s CNN show on Monday where he said that the war in Iraq would be over when Mr. Bush leaves office on January 20, 2009. The prescription in the rose-colored glasses that the administration wears when it comes to Iraq hasn’t changed since the president landed on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit to announce the end of major combat operations two years ago. The fighting won’t be over by then, and the only question is whether Americans will still be dying in Iraq or whether the administration will bring them home.

Mr. Cheney, who also used the program to slam Amnesty International for calling the American detention center at Guantanamo Bay a “gulag,” said, "I think we may well have some kind of presence there over a period of time. 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."

Faith-based foreign policy must be a glorious comfort to its practitioners. When looking at the facts, the evidence suggests just the contrary. Deaths among Iraqi security forces since December 31 total 876: 265 in May, up from 199 in April and 200 in March, 103 in February and 109 in January. Among coalition forces, the death total is now 1848 since the first shot was fired; since the New Year, it’s 363, with 84 in May alone – 76 of them Yanks.

Simple body counts, as the world learned in Vietnam, don’t really determine who is winning and who is losing. Ho Chi Minh was prepared to lose 10 of his for 1 of the enemy, and in the end, that was sufficient to his purpose. In Iraq, the situation is simple enough – the war will not end until the last American leaves, and maybe not even then. But body counts do prove one thing, the war continues. The higher the count, the higher the intensity.

The administration will claim that the increased jihadist activity is its final dying gasp. Maybe so, but that claim has grown old and the White House has cried “wolf” before over this. There will be paramilitary violence in Iraq when the next president is sworn in, and if Mr. Cheney is right about the continued American presence in Iraq, there will be American deaths among them. This is one bet Kensington would gladly lose.


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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