John Abizaid
John Abizaid
John Philip Abizaidis a retired United States Army general and former U.S. Central Commandcommander, overseeing American military operations in a 27-country region, from the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, to South and Central Asia, covering much of the Middle East. CENTCOM oversees 250,000 US troops. Abizaid succeeded General Tommy Franks as Commander, USCENTCOM, on July 7, 2003, and was also elevated to the rank of four-star general the same week. He was succeeded by Admiral William J. Fallon on...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSoldier
Date of Birth1 April 1951
CountryUnited States of America
I believe that there are elements of extra-legal militias that are moving around doing some of this damage. There may be people with misguided loyalties in some of the security services, although less in the army than in the police.
The real target is creating enough chaos in Iraq so that an extremist government can emerge there that would be friendly and conducive to the form of ideology that bin Laden, Zawahiri and Zarqawi believe in.
There are a lot of people in the Middle East who believe our weakness is our inability to stay the course, and they believe that two casualties today, two casualties tomorrow, four the next day, will eventually drive us out,
Yet, we believe that that's probably the vigilance of Iraqi security forces and some of our proactive measures the night before probably saved lives.
We have a number of killed in the action in Nasiriya with the Marines -- I believe that number will remain less than 10 -- and a number of wounded,
In terms of comparison from six months ago, in terms of foreign fighters, I believe there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago, ... In terms of overall strength of the insurgency, I would say it is the same as it was.
I don't believe Iran is a suicide state.
I believe we've... we've worked very hard with the Iraqis to build a better place ever since the fall of Saddam's government.
We certainly will take whatever military action we need to defend ourselves and to prevent the enemy from taking advantage there,
The scope of devastation is gigantic. The level of work which has to be done is very immense,
there's actually some indication, based on intelligence information that we have, that ammo is starting to be difficult for them to obtain in certain areas.
We have decided to make sure that we're cautious about how we're operating, and I have nothing to say further than that,
Boots per square inch is not the issue. You have to have solid intelligence in a conflict such as this, so you can get to the terrorists,
Tell them we are winning, ... You don't define success as the absence of hard losses. You define it - are you defeating the enemy?