Unqualified Offerings

Gareth Porter of InterPress Service also covered Vines’ WINEP address, and highlights a different portion of the talk:
In a speech at the Washington Institute Thursday, Gen. Vines recalled that an analysis on which he worked in fall 2004 had portrayed a three-tier insurgency, the largest element of which consisted of “Sunnis who rejected the authority [...]

The Times of London says that the US and Iraqi governments – once there is an Iraqi government – are going to launch a major “clear, build and hold” operation in the Iraqi capital by sometime late summer. This is essentially the plan Greg Djerejian has been advocating recently.
Its boosters call the proposed operation “the [...]

General John R. Vines told a WINEP audience yesterday that “Al Qaeda in Iraq and its presumed leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi, have conceded strategic defeat and are on their way out of the country, a top U.S. military official contended yesterday,” according to the Washington Times. On the strange bedfellows front, the sparsely repeated story [...]