Iraqi insurgency 'losing steam'
2005-08-07 22:49
Washington - US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said in an interview released on Sunday that the insurgency in Iraq is "losing steam" while "rather quiet political progress" remains on track there.
Those developments augur well, she said, for the future of democracy in Iraq, despite an entrenched insurgency.
"If you think about how to defeat an insurgency, you defeat it not just militarily but politically," Rice told Time magazine in an interview.
"It's a lot easier to see the violence and suicide bombing than to see the rather quiet political progress that's going on in parallel," she said.
"I do think the insurgency has a problem, which is that as the political process matures and the Iraqis every day accept the political process as their future, (the insurgents) become more and more isolated from the population and they become nothing but a destructive force," said Rice.
She said there is little choice but to embrace political reform in the Arab world to combat Islamic terrorism, saying it is important "to have faith in the democratic enterprise as one actually that is quite capable of overcoming difference."
On a separate note, Rice expressed a certain satisfaction at her breakthrough as the first African-American woman to become US secretary of state.
"If somebody had looked at the United States in 1789, or for that matter 1864, or for that matter 1954, and said the secretary of state will be a black woman - and by the way, that will be after the last secretary of state was a black man and the secretary of state before that was a woman - people would have said, 'No, really - are you kidding me?'"