More On Cheney's Salesmanship

This is a very well balanced article by Knight-Ridder.

There is a bunch of great stuff about a great many things Iraq related.

As is often typical, the tastiest bits are relegated to the last few paragraphs.

Here's the Dick sales angle:

[snip]...The Republicans, however, are handicapped by the fact that their top advocates for staying the course in Iraq - Bush, Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney - are no longer viewed as credible by a majority of Americans.

Cheney demonstrated this problem in a speech the other day: "Those who advocate a sudden withdrawal from Iraq should answer a couple simple questions. Would the United States and other free nations be better off or worse off with Zarqawi, bin Laden, and Zawahiri in control of Iraq?"

He thus implied that foreign jihadists run the insurgency (the same insurgency that he recently claimed was in its "last throes"). But a new report by military expert Anthony Cordesman, at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies, concludes on the basis of evidence gathered from U.S. intelligence and Iraqi contacts that between 90 and 96 percent of insurgents are homegrown Iraqis rebelling against the ascendant Shiites and the U.S. occupation...[/snip]

Of course we have known for some time that the vast majority of the insurgents are Iraqis demonstrating nationalistic and religious pride(if you ever questioned why pride is one of the seven deadly sins, I believe you have an answer).

Why and the hell is it that most of us in the US can only understand our own sources of pride? We can't be that insular and ignorant..Or can we?

And here's a bit for the pollsters mentioned below to chew on:

[snip]...Nor can the administration assume any longer that its critics are all Democrats. A leading critic these days is William Odom, a retired Army general who ran the National Security Agency for Ronald Reagan. He thinks the Iraq war "will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history," and he urges "rapid withdrawal" because "to hang on to an untenable position is the height of irresponsibility."..[/snip]

(much more at link)(if you only read one article today, this isn't a bad one)

Of course it would be folly to consider that Odom is the only GOP partisan to see and voice that the Iraq war is a plainly bad idea. When the Republican controlled Senate voting for a resolution that 2006 as "a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty" it is clear that there is consensus that something dramatic need be done about Iraq(the vote was 79-19).