On the second anniversary of the United States-led invasion of Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used the American Sunday talk shows to praise what he called Iraq's liberation, pointing to its elections and its newly seated constituent assembly.
Speaking on Fox News Sunday and ABC on 20 March 2005, Rumsfeld said he still wished US forces had not been blocked from opening a northern front through Türkiye, which he argued had helped the insurgency take hold. The reference was to the Turkish parliament's vote of 1 March 2003, which denied American troops passage to invade Iraq from the north.
Rumsfeld described the insurgency as persistent but weaker than before, and signaled a coming drawdown of US forces from about 152,000 toward roughly 135,000 to 140,000, as Iraqi security forces grew past 145,000. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, put the number of trained Iraqis at 142,000 and projected 200,000 by the summer, even as a congressional report questioned such counts.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this AFP wire report, first published in March 2005, in its own words.