- America's former proconsul in Baghdad delivered a damning
critique of the Bush administration's policy on Iraq yesterday, saying
the US had made two grave errors of judgment in the early days of the war.
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- Paul Bremer, who was America's most senior official in
Baghdad until the handover last June, said the US committed two major blunders
which compromised the course of events in Iraq: it went to war without
enough troops and it did not contain the looting and violence after Saddam
Hussein's regime fell.
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- "We paid a big price for not stopping it because
it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," Mr Bremer told a conference
of insurance agents in West Virginia. "We never had enough troops
on the ground."
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- Mr Bremer is the latest in a stream of US government
officials to voice doubts on the administration's strategy on Iraq, but
such criticism is surprising from a man who says he "strongly supports"
the re-election of President George Bush .
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- The comments, surfacing only hours ahead of last night's
vice-presidential debate between John Edwards and Dick Cheney, were very
badly timed for the administration - and a boon for the Democrats.
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- Mr Cheney is widely regarded as the architect of the
war and came under renewed pressure to account for what the Democratic
challenger, John Kerry, yesterday called a "long list of mistakes"
on Iraq. "I hope Mr Cheney can take responsibility," Mr Kerry
said.
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- Mr Bremer's comments are also a belated rebuke to the
defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who overruled his army chief of staff
and other military officials by opting for a smaller invasion force, and
who famously dismissed reports of looting in April 2003 by saying "Stuff
happens" and "Freedom is untidy".
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- Mr Rumsfeld attempted yesterday to undo the damage from
statements made hours earlier, in which he acknowledged there was no connection
between al-Qaida and Saddam. "To my knowledge, I have not seen any
strong, hard evidence that links the two," Mr Rumsfeld told the Council
on Foreign Relations .
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- The statement - a u-turn on Mr Rumsfeld's assertion in
September 2002 that the CIA had "bulletproof" evidence of a connection
- appeared in line with a new intelligence review that failed to find a
connection.
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- Mr Rumsfeld later said his comments to the council had
been "misunderstood".
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- More attention was devoted to the comments from Mr Bremer,
who shared Mr Cheney's and Mr Rumsfeld's views on Iraq, and who maintained
yesterday that America was right to go to war.
-
- The White House yesterday refused to say whether Mr Bremer
had asked for more troops during his frequent visits to Washington.
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- Meanwhile, Mr Bremer released a statement claiming that
his remarks were intended for a private audience, and that the US now had
sufficient troops on the ground.
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- He also reaffirmed that the war in Iraq is an "integral
part of fighting this war on terror".
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- However, Mr Bremer began expressing doubts about the
administration's strategy before his speech to the insurance conference.
During a September 17 appearance at Indiana's DePauw University he accused
the administration of disregarding his advice to bring in more troops.
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- "The single most important change - the one thing
that would have improved the situation - would have been having more troops
in Iraq at the beginning and throughout [the occupation]," Mr Bremer
was reported to have said.
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- The debate on America's preparations for war on Iraq
was opened in early 2003 when the then army chief of staff, General Eric
Shinseki, said the invasion needed an occupying force of several hundred
thousand soldiers - much to the fury of Mr Rumsfeld whose battle plans
called for a streamlined force.
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- In January, the chief weapons inspector, David Kay, testified
that western intelligence agencies "were all wrong" in their
assessment that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
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- Last month, a former CIA official Paul Pillar told a
private dinner that the White House disregarded intelligence reports two
months before the invasion warning that a war could unleash a violent insurgency.
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- Mr Bremer claimed that US planners had failed to anticipate
the chaos that would follow Saddam's departure, saying that planners were
more concerned with preventing a refugee exodus and a humanitarian crisis
that did not arise. "There was planning, but planning for a situation
that didn't arise," he said.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1320673,00.html
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