America’s former proconsul in Baghdad delivered a damning critique of the Bush administration’s policy on Iraq on Tuesday, saying the United States had made two grave errors of judgment in the early days of the war.
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.
”We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness,” Bremer told a conference of insurance agents in West Virginia. ”We never had enough troops on the ground.”
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 .
The comments, surfacing only hours ahead of Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate between John Edwards and Dick Cheney, were very badly timed for the administration — and a boon for the Democrats.
Cheney is widely regarded as the architect of the war and came under renewed pressure to account for what the Democratic challenger, John Kerry, on Tuesday called a ”long list of mistakes” on Iraq. ”I hope Mr Cheney can take responsibility,” Kerry said.
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”.
Rumsfeld attempted on Tuesday to undo the damage from statements made hours earlier, in which he acknowledged there was no connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam. ”To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two,” Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations .
The statement — a u-turn on 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.
Rumsfeld later said his comments to the council had been ”misunderstood”.
More attention was devoted to the comments from Bremer, who shared Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s views on Iraq, and who maintained yesterday that America was right to go to war.
The White House on Tuesday refused to say whether Bremer had asked for more troops during his frequent visits to Washington.
Meanwhile, 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.
He also reaffirmed that the war in Iraq is an ”integral part of fighting this war on terror”.
However, 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.
”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],” Bremer was reported to have said.
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 Rumsfeld whose battle plans called for a streamlined force.
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.
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.
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. – Guardian Unlimited Â