White House defends progress in Iraq as ex-commander sees 'nightmare'
WASHINGTON (AFP) — The White House insisted that progress was being made in Iraq after a former top US commander there assailed its strategy and lamented that the war was "a nightmare with no end in sight."
Retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez delivered a scathing assessment of the management of the war as he denounced US political leaders as "incompetent," "inept" and "derelict in the performance of their duty."
Whoa! Does it get any worse than this? Forget about impeachment, any other president and Vice would have been lynched by now!
"There is no question that America is living a nightmare with no end in sight," said Sanchez on Friday, addressing a meeting of military correspondents and editors in Arlington, a Virginia suburb of Washington.
He blasted President George W. Bush's "surge" strategy which calls for maintaining more than 160,000 US troops in Iraq until the end of the year in the hope of reducing sectarian violence and bringing political stability.
The strategy has since been adjusted, with the current plan calling for the withdrawal of about 21,500 combat troops by next July to bring the total to the "pre-surge" level of 130,000 servicemen.
But Sanchez said he did not believe these changes would prove effective.
"Continued manipulations and adjustments to our military strategy will not achieve victory," he said. "The best we can do with this flawed approach is stave off defeat."
Reacting to his comments, the White House evoked a September report to Congress by the current US military commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and US Ambassador Ryan Crocker. They painted a difficult situation that they said was nevertheless marked by gradual improvements.
"We appreciate his service to the country," White House spokesman Trey Bohn told AFP, of Sanchez.
"As General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker have said, there is more work to be done, but progress is being made in Iraq. And that's what we are focused on now."
Born into a poor family in southern Texas, Sanchez rose through the ranks of the US military to become the highest-ranking Hispanic in the US Army.
In 1991, he served as a battalion commander during Operation Desert Storm, a US-led allied operation to drive Iraqi forces from occupied Kuwait.
He became commander of coalition forces in Iraq in June 2003, after the US-led invasion, and served in that capacity for a year.
Sanchez retired from the military in November 2006, part of the fallout from a scandal over abuse of detainees by US military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
He now has harsh words about the US war strategy, even suggesting that civilian leaders would have been court-martialed had they been in the military.
"There is nothing going on today in Washington that would give us hope," he said in his speech.
He said US political leaders from both parties have been too often consumed by partisan grandstanding and political struggles that, as he put it, at times have "endangered the lives of our sons and daughters on the battlefield."
"There has been a glaring, unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders," Sanchez said. "In my profession, these type of leaders would immediately be relieved or court-martialed."
"The administration, Congress and the entire inter-agency, especially the Department of State, must shoulder the responsibility for this catastrophic failure and the American people must hold them accountable," he added.
For all his criticism, Sanchez essentially agreed with Bush's position that a precipitous US military withdrawal from Iraq would plunge the country and, possibly the whole region, into chaos.
He argued that some level of US military presence in Iraq would be necessary "for the foreseeable future."
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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
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