Outgoing US vice-president Dick Cheney said the US was close to achieving its aims in Iraq.
Interviewed on CBS's " Face the Nation," today, Mr Cheney offered another spirited defense of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, of which he was a key proponent and architect.
"We are close to achieving most of our objectives. We have a significant reduction in the overall level of violence," said Mr Cheney, who leaves office later this month.
He also cited the removal of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the new Iraqi constitution, the Iraqi elections, and a recent framework agreement providing for a US military withdrawal by 2011 as successes.
"All of these things by anybody's standards would be evidence of significant success," he said.
In a series of farewell interviews, Mr Cheney has been defending the decision to invade Iraq and the subsequent US occupation which led to the deaths of over 4,000 US servicemen and women.
There is no official count of Iraqi civilian casualties since the invasion but some independent studies have put the number in the hundreds of thousands.
Mr Cheney acknowledged that prewar intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were wrong. But he again argued that Saddam had the technology, the personnel and the desire to build such weapons again.
Reuters