Top U.S. officials warned on Sunday that attacks against new Iraqi officials would continue and Secretary of State Colin Powell pledged to do "everything we can to defeat this insurgency."
Appearing on "Fox News Sunday" amid a new spate of assassinations in Iraq, Powell acknowledged the difficulty of protecting the new leaders who are slated to take over on June 30.
Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice spoke in separate U.S. television interviews as a suicide car bomber killed up to 12 Iraqis near a U.S.-Iraqi base in Baghdad and gunmen killed a senior Iraqi civil servant and a university professor. A similar precise attack on Saturday killed a senior Foreign Ministry official.
"It's hard to protect an entire government ... it's very difficult," Powell said. "It is going to be a dangerous period and these murderers have to be defeated."
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http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=KRGPQM1MHNOVYCRBAE0CFEY?type=topNews&storyID=5408178&pageNumber=1All is going smashingly well, although some Iraqis apparently still regard members of the occupier-appointed government as traitors and enemies and want to kill them. Despite constant mayhem, this is a continuing foreign policy success from the Bushistas, rather similar to Afghanistan! Which country will be next in line?