The first, not the last throes (toon on site also)

[rodeodance]

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF25Ak04.html

The first, not the last throes
By Pepe Escobar

"The insurgency in Iraq is in its last throes."
- Vice President Dick Cheney, in May

Even the Central Intelligence Agency now admits that Iraq is the new Afghanistan - breeding a new, lethal generation of jihadis. Iraq has also been the new Vietnam since the day the resistance was born, April 18, 2003, in front of the Abu Hanifa mosque in Baghdad. Iraq as the new Vietnam replays - in a new setting - the movie of a superpower being subdued by a guerrilla war. Remember former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz's famous words before the invasion: "Let the desert be our jungles."

A mini-Tet offensive happened in Baghdad on Monday. In a city allegedly under the control of American and American-trained Iraqi forces, more than 100 guerrillas mounted a devastating attack on Baya'a, the biggest police station in Baghdad - employing successive waves of mortars, explosions, rocket-launcher attacks, hand grenades, sophisticated diversionary tactics and the sinister icing on the lethal cake, car bombings. Hi al-Elam, the neighborhood around the police station, was turned into a smoldering disaster zone. The guerrillas retreated after two hours, having lost dozens of men. But just like the Tet offensive, the message was clear: the writing, scrawled in graffiti, was literally on the walls of Hi al-Elam - "We'll be back."

Three days after this mini-battle in Baghdad, the Pentagon top brass had to face the fact that the writing on the wall is now becoming increasingly visible not only to tens of millions of Americans (60%, according to the latest polls) but to the cowed, Bush administration-intimidated Congress as well. Nevertheless, during eight hours of back-to-back testimony to House and Senate committees in Washington, the Pentagon still refused to abandon the rhetoric of "steady progress" and "victory is certain".

General John Abizaid, the Centcom chief, had to admit "more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago" - not exactly Cheney's "last throes" scenario. Senator Robert Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia, told Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld to "get off your high horse" and stop answering questions "with a sneer". Senator Ted Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, went one step further and suggested it was time for Rumsfeld to go.
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[samsingh]

1. another mission accomplished statement?