Cheney: insurgents in Iraq

cymrococh · October 31, 2006

Disgusting that they think they can get away with statements like this.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/midterms2006/sto...1935866,00.html

The US vice-president, Dick Cheney, yesterday said insurgents in Iraq were stepping up attacks in an attempt to influence voters in next week's US midterm elections.

Mr Cheney - one of the main architects of the war in Iraq - said fighters had increased the level of violence and were monitoring US public opinion on the internet.

"It's my belief that they're very sensitive of the fact that we've got an election scheduled and they can get on the websites like anybody else," Mr Cheney told Fox News.

With Iraq turning into a yoke for the Republicans in the midterms, Mr Cheney and the president, George Bush, are turning up the rhetoric in an attempt to energise Republican supporters in tight races.

"However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: the terrorists win and America loses," Mr Bush told a raucous crowd in the southern state of Georgia.

"That's what's at stake in this election. The Democrat goal is to get out of Iraq. The Republican goal is to win in Iraq."

However, the Los Angeles Times today reported that growing numbers of US military officers were privately questioning the White House assertion that setting a deadline for troop reductions would strengthen the insurgency and undermine efforts to create stability.

The paper cited Kurt Campbell, a former Pentagon official, as saying that more officers were calling for deadlines after concluding that the indefinite presence of US forces was enabling the Shia-run Iraqi government to avoid making compromises.

The US has recently suffered one of its highest military death tolls since the war began in 2003, with more than 100 troops killed in October. The rising level of casualties and the spiralling sectarian violence have turned the war into a liability for the Republicans.

The party fears that an increasingly unpopular conflict and a sex scandal over a congressman who sent lewd emails to congressional pages could lead to the loss of the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate as well.

As Mr Cheney raised the possibility that insurgents were trying to sway US voters, it emerged that the Pentagon was planning to set up an information unit to accentuate positive news from Iraq.

In a memo obtained by the Associated Press, Dorrance Smith, an assistant secretary of defence for public affairs, said new teams of people would "develop messages" for the 24-hour news cycle and "correct the record". The plan would focus more resources on the internet, including blogs.

The Pentagon proposal takes a leaf out of Bill Clinton's book. In his successful 1992 presidential race, Mr Clinton set up a highly effective rapid response team to quickly challenge assertions from opponents or the media.

The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has complained that the press focuses too much on bad news from Iraq, claiming that not enough is said about progress being made.

During a trip to Nevada this year, Mr Rumsfeld said he was deeply troubled by the success of terrorist groups in "manipulating the media" to influence westerners. "That's the thing that keeps me up at night," he added.

Stevie H · October 31, 2006

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