Over 800 attacks every week in Iraq

· Woodward and Pentagon clash over war toll
· Colonel says only pullout will end insurgency

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Saturday September 30, 2006
The Guardian


Pools of blood on the streets of central Baghdad after car bombs exploded. Photo: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/Getty
 


The Bush administration has misled the American people about the level of violence in Iraq, where there is an attack by insurgent forces every 15 minutes, Bob Woodward, the investigative journalist, said yesterday.
In a new book, State of Denial, Woodward argues that the White House disregarded warnings from advisers in the autumn of 2003 that it needed thousands more troops to put down the insurgency. He says the administration continues to deny the gravity of the situation in Iraq because of Mr Bush's conviction that it was right to go to war.

"It's getting to the point now where there are 800-900 attacks a week. That's more than a hundred a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces," Woodward told CBS television in an interview to be aired tomorrow night.

The Pentagon's latest quarterly report on Iraq, presented to Congress and posted on the defence department website on September 1, shows the number of attacks rising to 792 a week in August. However, that figure includes attacks on Iraqi civilians, infrastructure and Iraqi police as well as US and coalition troops. Iraqi civilians suffered the majority of casualties.

Woodward argues the administration routinely glosses over such news from the ground, as well as intelligence predicting further deterioration in Iraq, because they collide with Mr Bush's convictions.

The White House failed to act on a memo from Robert Blackwill, then the senior Iraqi adviser on the National Security Council, calling for 40,000 additional troops in Iraq, he writes. It is equally resistant to intelligence forecasts of worsening violence in the year ahead.

The National Intelligence Estimate, parts of which were released this week by Mr Bush, predicted rising violence in Iraq as the conflict there becomes a "cause célèbre" for the global jihad.

"The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying], 'Oh, no, things are going to get better'," Woodward told CBS.

The vice-president, Dick Cheney, remained similarly unswayed by mounting evidence that Saddam Hussein never had weapons of mass destruction, phoning weapons inspectors at 3am to advise on possible locations of chemical warfare sites.

Such criticism is unlikely to dent Mr Bush's confidence in his decision to go to war. In a speech in Washington yesterday, he criticised those who say the war exposed Americans to greater risk of an attack by al-Qaida. "This argument buys into the enemy's propaganda that the terrorists attack us because we're provoking them," he said.

But as he tried again to rally Americans, the commander of US forces in the volatile Anbar province was predicting that the insurgency would not end until US forces were gone. "The insurgency's days will eventually come to an end. And they will come to an end at the hands of the Iraqis, who, by definition, will always be perceived as more legitimate than an external force like our own," said Colonel Sean MacFarland.

In this, his third book on the administration, Woodward relies on the off-the-record interviews with US officials that have become his trademark. But unlike his earlier chronicles of the White House, Woodward did not have access to Mr Bush or Mr Cheney.