Cheney and Bush claim violence declining in Iraq

earth_as_one

Time Out
Jan 5, 2006
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On a day when reporters covering Cheney's press conference in Baghdad's green zone had to be hustled into the basement when a nearby blast rattled windows and a suicide truck bomb killed 14 people in what had been a relatively peaceful corner of Iraq, Cheney announced that violence is actually decreasing in Iraq.

Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 10, 2007

...Cheney's second trip to Iraq comes as more than half of the nearly 30,000 new U.S. troops being deployed to the country, in a buildup intended to curb the ongoing violence, have arrived in and around Baghdad. The daily threats were made clear on Wednesday when an early evening explosion shook the windows in the U.S. Embassy while Cheney was visiting. Reporters following Cheney took cover temporarily in the basement but Cheney was not moved and "his business was not disrupted," said Lea Anne McBride, his spokeswoman.

U.S. military and embassy officials said they did not know what caused the explosion, though it is common for mortar shells and rockets to land within the Green Zone, where the embassy is located.

At a news conference after the blast, Cheney said his discussions with U.S. military and Iraqi officials suggested that sectarian violence was declining in Iraq but that the situation remained precarious.

"I think everybody recognizes there still are serious security problems, security threats -- no question about it," he said. "But the impression I got from talking with them -- and this includes their military as well as political leadership -- is that they do believe we are making progress, but we've got a long way to go."

The most startling violence in Iraq on Wednesday came in the northern region known as Kurdistan, considered almost a sanctuary from sectarian violence and a place where officials are aggressively recruiting foreign investment and pushing for economic growth. A suicide attacker's truck bomb exploded outside the headquarters of the Interior Ministry in the regional capital of Irbil, killing at least 14 people and wounding 87, many of them government employees...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/09/AR2007050902460.html

According to Bush, the violence is declining if you don't count car bombs and suicide bombers:

U.S. officials exclude bombs in touting drop in Iraq violence

By Nancy A. Youssef

04/27/07 -- - "
McClatchy" -- - -WASHINGTON - U.S. officials who say there has been a dramatic drop in sectarian violence in Iraq since President Bush began sending more American troops into Baghdad aren't counting one of the main killers of Iraqi civilians.

Car bombs and other explosive devices have killed thousands of Iraqis in the past three years, but the administration doesn't include them in the casualty counts it has been citing as evidence that the surge of additional U.S. forces is beginning to defuse tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

President Bush explained why in a television interview on Tuesday. "If the standard of success is no car bombings or suicide bombings, we have just handed those who commit suicide bombings a huge victory," he told TV interviewer Charlie Rose...

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17603.htm