He Was Right About The Insurgency's Death Throes After All

First of all, this repost is in order from July 2005:


Remember Dick Cheney's statement some months back about the invading insurgency in Iraq being on its death throes? Liberals wanted to ridicule this notion when Donald Rumsfeld testified that it would take perhaps a dozen years to finish off the enemy in Iraq. Well guess what? The enemy has indeed lost the war; it is the mopping up of what's left of the enemy that will take many years. The question to ask is not "How can America possibly win the war?" It's "Do we have the will to finish the job?

To further prove this point, we have the unreported bullishness on Iraq by its business leaders. Notes Abdul Hafiz Al-Atti, director of the Basra Business Council and a member of Basra's Board of Trade (chances are you wouldn't even know such entities even existed from MSM coverage; check The American Enterprise's July/August issue for some more detail), "We have everything here - oil, date groves, a port, the Shatt-Al-Arab waterway." What is needed is for US and British companies as well as others around the world to invest in Basra. "In ten years we can be like (Dubai). Why not?"

Why not, indeed.

FOLLOW UP: Nearly a year later we have basically the same thing being said about the steady defeat of the enemy from Barry McCaffrey after his recent trip to Iraq.