Rumsfeld’s about-face on the war

Here is the transcript of the Fox News Sunday interview in which Secretary Rumsfeld offhandedly announced that the U.S. is not going to win in Iraq. I had supplied a paraphrase of the quote in an earlier blog entry. According to a Google search late Monday afternoon, this bombshell statement, transforming the entire character of the war we thought our country had been fighting under President Bush’s leadership, has been reported in only two newspapers in the United States.

Chris Wallace:

[A Vietnam veteran whose son is serving in Iraq told me] that we are fighting another Vietnam in the sense that we don’t have enough force to win. And then he said, the problem is … “Rumsfeld tried to fight this on the cheap.” What do you say to that patriotic but very concerned father?

Rumsfeld:

… [T]he implication of the question was that we don’t have enough to win against the insurgency. We’re not going to win against the insurgency. The Iraqi people are going to win against the insurgency. That insurgency could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, ten, twelve years.

Coalition forces, foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency. We’re going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win against that insurgency.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 27, 2005 05:51 PM | Send