Another Clue That Iraq Is A Complete Mess

We already know that Iraq is in the shitter because of the W, Rove and Co. making it the "central front on the war on terror." Just ask yourself how frequently the power and water was turned off before we got there. And, don't hand me that bullshit about Saddam being a brutal dictator and killer, because you can't say that we are not just as bad a set of murderers as well. I'm just wondering how long it's going to be before we get to flush the sonofabitches that caused it.

Q Tony, can I ask you about Iraq? It was a year ago today that Vice President Cheney said that the insurgency there was in its last throes, and now we have this latest Pentagon assessment saying that the insurgency is going to remain steady, the strength will remain steady through the rest of this year. How does the administration reconcile --

MR. SNOW: Well, there was a time when -- and I don't want to try to back-interpret what the Vice President said, but let me just offer at least one view on it, which is, for a long time, when we talked about insurgency -- that is, "we," generally, Americans -- we thought of al Qaeda. And I think it's pretty safe to say that the al Qaeda and the foreign fighters remnant presence in Iraq has been dramatically reduced, such that, at least, in the opinions of people there, it is no longer the major factor when it comes to what's going on. Now you do have former members of the Saddam regime and you do have Iraqi citizens who are in entrenched opposition and are using terror and other tactics to try to derail democracy.

Again, I don't want to try to back-interpret what the Vice President said. But I do think that one of the significant changes from the weeks and months after the end of major combat activities in Iraq and today is that that al Qaeda presence has been dramatically, very dramatically reduced -- but it does mean that we still do have opposition within former elements.