Remember when there was some dispute about whether Iraq was a quagmire?

[Rose Siding]

These quotes are from a conference this weekend-

"You cannot win against an insurgency that springs from the population," said Jack Valenti, former special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson. "There's never been an insurgency that doesn't prevail against a mighty power."

"How much reform can you do," former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger wondered later, "simultaneously with fighting a war?"......

"It appears to me we haven't learned very much," said Alexander M. Haig Jr., Kissinger's assistant in the Nixon White House and secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan.....

"The current battle is going very well," McNamara said, and then continued with a sentence whose Catch-22 logic made the audience laugh. "The problem is that it's not producing the conditions that will almost certainly win for us.".....

"The sorry odor of the same aromas that we found in Vietnam" can be detected in Iraq today, Valenti said....

Where just a few years ago it was debated whether Iraq could be called a "quagmire" such as Vietnam, here the question seemed to be: Could it be worse?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/11/AR2006031101101_2.html

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

1. "going very, very well" General Peter Pace. 3-5-2006

GEN. PACE: I’d say they’re going well. I wouldn’t put a great big smiley face on it, but I would say they’re going very, very well from everything you look at, whether it be on the political side where they’ve had three elections, they’ve written their own constitution, they’re forming their government. You look at the military side where this time last year there were just a handful of battalions in the field, Iraqi battalions in the field. Now there are over 100 battalions in the field. They had no brigades—that’s about 3,000 men each. Now they’ve got about 31 brigades. No matter where you look at their military, their police, their society, things are much better this year than they were last.