http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/07/AR2007070701274.html states "As they work to put together the reports due to Congress next week and in September, these officials and others close to Iraq policy recognize that the administration is boxed in by measurements that were enshrined in U.S. law in May.
"That is a problem," the official said. "These are congressionally mandated benchmarks now." They require Bush to certify movement in areas ranging from the passage of specific legislation by the Iraqi parliament to the numbers of Iraqi military units able to operate independently. If he cannot make a convincing case, the legislation requires the president to explain how he will change his strategy.
Top administration officials are aware that the strategy's stated goal -- using U.S. forces to create breathing space for Iraqi political reconciliation -- will not be met by September, said one person fresh from a White House meeting."
The article "Sunni Insurgent Leader Paints Iran as 'Real Enemy' - U.S. Strategy Described as Only Inflaming Iraqi Resistance" at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/13/AR2007071301792.html
shouldn't be 100% believed, but then we should trust W's less than 5% of W's propaganda. It states "Over the course of a 90-minute interview, a leader of an armed Sunni group in western Baghdad described his hatred for Iran and the current Iraqi government, while outlining the dimensions of an armed insurgency that extends well beyond al-Qaeda in Iraq, the organization that U.S. officials routinely identify as their central enemy.
Abu Sarhan, as the 37-year-old insurgent wished to be known, said Iraq's Sunnis are deep into an entrenched and irresolvable civil war against Iranian-backed Shiites. He said the premise of the U.S. military's counterinsurgency strategy deploying thousands of soldiers in small outposts in violent neighborhoods -- only inflames the insurgency and prompts attacks against the Americans.
If U.S. forces release Sunni detainees, remove the concrete blast barriers that now cordon off several neighborhoods and improve services in areas neglected by the Shiite-led government, "the attacks will be reduced 95 percent within days," he said. He added that the Americans' insistence on striking Sunni areas "is generating an increasing resistance."
"We must defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq," Bush said, but Abu Sarhan described al-Qaeda in Iraq as one of "hundreds" of insurgent groups, some aligned and others in some degree of conflict, ranging from cells of about 10 people to groups with scores or hundreds of members.
Why is W blathering on about al-Qaeda in Iraq when this informant who obviously doesn't think of himself as a terrorist, but a freedom fighter, states "Any person in the position of the American president, who has drawn himself a certain path, would be very embarrassed to change that track and confess that he has been wrong. Unless he loves his people more than he loves himself. Only then could he confess his wrongdoing for the sake of his people."
W's hubris is why he keeps on conflating the villains who perpetrated the 9-11 atrocity against us and this al-Qaeda in Iraq and why he insists that al-Qaeda in Iraq is our greatest enemy in Iraq, even though everyone knows, including the nameless US official as well as the Iraqi freedom fighter or insurgent, whatever you wish to label him, says W's lack of compassion for innocent Iraqis and our US troops as the cause of these atrocities.
Iraq was bad with Hussein, but it will be worse as a result of this failed policy as "But when the Americans do eventually leave, Abu Sarhan said, "the future will be dim."
"There will be a fierce civil war, a grinding civil war, because Iran will always be there," he said. "But the Sunnis are ready for such a day."
