- NEW YORK (Reuters) - Senior
Bush administration officials are for the first time openly discussing
what could go wrong not only during an attack on Iraq but also in the aftermath
of an invasion, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.
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- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has a typewritten
list of risks, according to The Times. He refers to it constantly, updating
it with his ideas and suggestions from senior military commanders, and
discusses it with President Bush, the newspaper said.
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- The list includes a "concern about Saddam Hussein
using weapons of mass destruction against his own people and blaming it
on us, which would fit a pattern," Rumsfeld told The Times.
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- He said the document also noted that Saddam "could
do what he did to the Kuwaiti oil fields and explode them, detonate, in
a way that lost that important revenue for the Iraqi people."
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- Rumsfeld's list also warns of Saddam hiding his weapons
in mosques, hospitals or cultural sites and using citizens or captured
foreign journalists as human shields, according to the report.
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- The risks, Rumsfeld told The Times, "run the gamut
from concerns about some of the neighboring states being attacked, concerns
about the use of weapons of mass destruction against those states or against
our forces in or out of Iraq."
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- A senior Bush administration official told the Times
there is uncertainty about how U.S. forces will be received.
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- According to his aides, President Bush has to prepare
the country for what one senior official calls "the very real possibility
that this will not look like Afghanistan," a military victory that
came with greater speed than any had predicted, and with fewer casualties,
the report said.
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