Iraqis now capable of conducting war without the US

Washington, DC - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Monday that escalating violence in Iraq demonstrated that the Iraqi population is now capable of waging the Iraq war without outside military aid, and pronounced that the American mission there "was a complete sucess". "Over the last month the Iraqis have been fighting like you wouldn't believe", said Rumsfeld in a press conference at the Pentagon. "New Iraqis are joining the war everyday - so many, in fact, that we don't know where they all came from. It's almost as they came in from nowhere."

"The average Iraqi fighter has made remarkable progress and we are very proud," said Lt. Col. Bailey Whitman, a spokesman for coalition forces stationed in Baghdad. "In the past several weeks, people across Iraq have, in a systematic way unthinkable just three years ago, overrun both Shi'a and Sunni neighborhoods with devastating results. This is an out-and-out success by the standards of the modern American military."

Rumsfeld, however, sought to reassure the Iraqi people that despite their rapid improvement, the U.S. would not abandon them. "We've accomplished a lot," Rumsfeld said. "But there's still so much to take from the people of this rich country, and we're not going to pack up and leave just because they're doing so well on their own. We look forward to working very, very closely with Iraq, once there's a friendly government in place that we can do business with."
Added Rumsfeld: "We plan to be around for a long, long time."


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