The “long, hard slog” continues:
According to reports, there was a series of least three explosions at or around 8:30 a.m. local time. I’m not sure how many there have been in the past 24 hours.
From the archives:
“Well, I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. I’ve talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with them, various groups and individuals, people who have devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq. And like Kanan Makiya who’s a professor at Brandeis, but an Iraqi, he’s written great books about the subject, knows the country intimately, and is a part of the democratic opposition and resistance. The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.”
Vice-President Dick Cheney
“Meet the Press”
March 16, 2003
And the overwhelmingly majority of Iraqi people have done just what the Vice President suggested. What’s your point? In Norther Iraq, Southern Iraq, Western Iraq, nothing but good news. In the Sunni triangle, there are clearly those who are unwilling to let go of the old ways, and those supported by al Qaeda and other terrorists who believe these kinds of attacks will cause us to lose our will. It won’t work.
Good point. If you exclude the bad things happening in Iraq, there’s nothing but good news.
Come to think of it, I don’t know why people make such a fuss about 11 September 2001. If you ignore what happened in New York, D.C., and a farm in PA, it was a beautiful day.
Hmmm… didn’t think you were one to misrepresent someone else’s words… but I was wrong.
My point, clearly, is that those explosions in Baghdad do not contradict anything Cheney said in that statement.
The Iraqi people did want to get rid of Saddam Hussein. They did welcome us as liberators. Why do Bush-haters refuse to see that? It looks as though the people responsible for those explosions may have been foreign nationals, not Iraqis. The one captured before blowing himself up may have been Syrian. So what do those explosions have to do with the VP’s comments on March 16th?
CJ,
I think a finer distinction is in order here. Given most Iraqi’s disdain for Saddam, U.S. forces were welcomed as liberators in a generic sense. But they were welcome us as a means to topple Saddam, not as Americans.
Now an increasing number of Iraqis, to borrow a phrase, “want their country back.” To some extent, the violence we’re seeing is a backlash against foreign occupation. To combat this, the U.S. must quickly lay out a roadmap to a rebuilt Iraq that doesn’t have American fingerprints all over it. We have yet to see that. And the clock is ticking.