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Cheney: Iraq to be self-governing by 2009
Vice President Cheney is predicting that Iraq will be a self-governing democracy by the time he leaves office, calling the current U.S. surge strategy “a remarkable success story” that will be studied for years to come.
“I am fairly confident we’ll have [Iraq] in a good place, where we’ll be able to look back on it and say, ‘That was the right decision. It was a sound decision going into Iraq,’”
“We’ve got a lot of work to do. We’re sort of halfway through the surge, in a sense. We’ll be going back to pre-surge levels over the course of the next year.”
The Vice President also said that he has no reason to to doubt the newly released National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. He said he thinks the intelligence community is doing the best job it can with the limited amount of information that’s available. He also made it clear that the Administration remains very concerned about Iran.
“We still think there’s need to continue the course we’ve been on to persuade the Iranians not to enrich uranium,” he said. “The long pole in the tent in terms of developing nuclear weapons, traditionally, historically, has been developing fissile material, either highly-enriched uranium or plutonium. In this case, they’re embarked upon the program to develop uranium, obviously.”
The Vice President also acknowledged that the Administration pretty much had to release the NIE, because it wouldn’t have stayed secret for very long. I suspected that was probably one of the reasons it was released. Unfortunately, nobody at any level of the government can keep their damn mouths shut anymore.
It really is ridiculous for Bush critics to seize upon this intelligence estimate as proof that Bush lied again. Liberals for some reason equate lying with being wrong. Secondly, the Israeli’s are saying today they believe the intel estimate is dead wrong.
I personally view the intel estimate with deep suspicion. Our intelligence community has gotten it wrong a lot recently, so just because they say Iran has “suspended” its weapons program doesn’t mean a whole lot to me. We should continue to exert as much political pressure as we possibly can on Iran, because at the very least they’re killing our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
-Chris Jones
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