Global Policy Forum

By Julian Borger

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, yesterday warned that the insurgency in Iraq could go on for at least a decade and confirmed that the army had been in contact with some of its leaders in an attempt to quell the violence. He spoke after insurgents launched coordinated suicide bomb attacks which killed at least 33 people and wounded dozens more in the northern city of Mosul.

Mr Rumsfeld said that Iraqis, not US troops, would eventually bring an end to attacks that have killed thousands of civilians and 1,730 American soldiers. His downbeat assessment, during a television interview, was in stark contrast to a claim at the end of May by the vice president, Dick Cheney, that the insurgency was "in its last throes". Rumsfeld said: "We're not going to win against the insurgency. The Iraqi people are going to win against the insurgency. That insurgency could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years."

Mr Rumsfeld confirmed that US officials were taking part in talks with insurgent leaders in Iraq. Asked about a report of two such meetings in yesterday's Sunday Times, he told Fox News: "Well, the first thing I would say about the meetings is they go on all the time." He added that Iraq had a sovereign government which could choose its own relationships with different groups of insurgents. "We facilitate those from time to time," Mr Rumsfeld said.

Al-Qaida in Iraq and another Sunni extremist group, the Ansar al-Sunnah army, both issued statements on militant Islamic websites yesterday denying having held talks with US or Iraqi government officials. Mr Rumsfeld made it clear that the talks had been with Iraqi insurgents rather than foreign fighters led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian extremist. He told NBC television's Meet the Press programme: "It isn't a matter of negotiating with terrorists. There's no one negotiating with Zarqawi or the people that are out chopping people's heads off."

General John Abizaid, the commander of US forces in the Middle East said that both US and Iraqi officials were "looking for the right people in the Sunni community to talk to ... and clearly we know that the vast majority of the insurgents are from the Sunni Arab community."

Amid steadily declining support for the war in the US and conflicting signals from the Bush administration, Mr Rumsfeld went out of his way to lower American expectations of a quick victory. He said: "We're going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win against that insurgency."

US war objectives have been ratcheted down in recent months from establishing stability in Iraq to training sufficient numbers of Iraqi government troops to fight the insurgency independently. The policy of lowering expectations however was thrown into confusion by Mr Cheney's claim that the insurgency was "in its last throes". The claim appeared to take other administration officials by surprise and forced them into a string of semantic contortions to explain it.

"The fact is that if you look at the context of his remarks, last throes could be a violent last throe, just as well as a placid or calm last throe. Look it up in the dictionary," Mr Rumsfeld said yesterday. He added: "There's no question but that the enemy is a thinking enemy, that their attacks are more lethal than they had been previously. They're killing a lot more Iraqis."

The defence secretary's back-to-back television appearances were part of a concerted administration campaign to convince the American public it has a winning strategy in Iraq amid falling home support. That public relations campaign will reach its peak tomorrow night with a prime-time address to the nation by President George Bush, who will call for popular resolve in support of the nation's 135,000 troops still in Iraq.