"Quackmire". It would be funny if it weren't so damn true.

Asia Times
June 24, 2003

Middle East
COMMENTARY
An Iraqi 'quackmire' in the making
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - "We know where they are," Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld
assured television interviewers about the location of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) March 30, two weeks into the war in Iraq. "They are in the
area around Tikrit and Baghdad."

"I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators," Vice President Dick
Cheney declared on television just as US troops massed along the border
between Kuwait and Iraq on the eve of the war.

"Wildly off the mark," declared Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, when
asked by senators just before the war whether then army chief of staff Eric
Shinseki's estimate that more than 200,000 troops would be needed as an
occupation force after hostilities was reasonable.

"I believe it is definitely more likely than not that some degree of common
knowledge between [al-Qaeda and Iraq] was involved [in the September 11,
2001, attacks]", former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief and member
of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board James Woolsey testified before a federal
court just before the war.

Now, more than two months after US troops established control over the area
around Tikrit and Baghdad, not only have no WMD been discovered, but
evidence of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, let alone Iraqi knowledge or
complicity in the September 11 attacks, is simply non-existent.

If that were not embarrassing enough, Washington still has about 150,000
troops in Iraq - twice the number projected before the war - and is
desperately seeking as many as 30,000 more troops from its "coalition"
partners, all expenses to be paid by the US taxpayer. That such a number may
not be nearly enough was underscored this weekend when unknown persons in a
remote desert area blew up a key oil pipeline that supplies Baghdad power
plants.

The "Q" word - for quagmire - has also made it back into mainstream-media
discourse as the impression grows that US troops may be facing a guerrilla
war, rather than isolated "pockets or resistance" of die-hard Ba'athists.

Rest at:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EF24Ak02.html