Print This Story  E-mail This Story

Also see below:     
Kerry Urges Bush to Admit Mistakes    •
Bremer: 'We Never Had Enough Troops'    •

    Go to Original

    Bremer Critique on Iraq Raises Political Furor
    By Elisabeth Bumiller and Jodi Wilgoren
    The New York Times

    Wednesday 06 October 2004

    Washington - Assertions by L. Paul Bremer III, the former top American administrator in Iraq, that President Bush had not sent enough troops to secure the country put the White House on the defensive on Iraq policy on Tuesday and prompted Senator John Kerry to expand his assault on Mr. Bush as commander in chief.

    Mr. Bremer's comments, made in two recent speeches, quickly moved to the center of the presidential campaign. He said at DePauw University on Sept. 17 that he had often raised the problem with the administration and "should have been even more insistent." He also spoke Monday at an insurance conference in West Virginia, where he apparently thought his comments were off the record.

    Mr. Kerry seized on the comments, first reported Tuesday by The Washington Post, and argued to an audience in Iowa that Mr. Bush "may be constitutionally unable to level with" the public. He called on Mr. Bush to own up to his mistakes in Iraq.

    During a speech on Tuesday at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Mr. Bremer said his remarks about troop strength had been somewhat distorted by the media.

    "We certainly had enough going into Iraq, because we won the war in a very short three weeks," Mr. Bremer said, according to The Associated Press. But he added: "One way to have stopped the looting would have been to have more troops on the ground. That's a retrospective wisdom of mine, looking backwards. I think there are enough troops there now for the job we are doing."

    The administration, without disputing Mr. Bremer's statements that he had wanted more troops when he arrived in May 2003, said that the force levels had been set by military commanders there. By the end of the day, Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, was insisting that Mr. Bush's instructions to his commanders about more troops were "just let me know, you'll have them."

    If administration officials were defending Mr. Bush's decisions in public, in background conversations they were clearly furious with Mr. Bremer, who in recent weeks they have blamed for much that has gone wrong in Baghdad.

    Still, two senior officials confirmed Tuesday evening that Mr. Bremer had sought more troops before he took up his post as the head of the coalition authority in Iraq, and that once he arrived in Baghdad he repeated his belief that the United States and its allies had committed insufficient forces to the task.

    "The reality is that Paul kept pressing the issue, because it was immediately clear that a lot of facilities - even arms stockpiles - were unguarded," said one senior official who was part of that debate but insisted on anonymity.

    Mr. Kerry, hammering away at the president's Iraq policy, called Mr. Bremer's remarks evidence that the administration had mismanaged the war. "There are a long list of mistakes and I'm glad that Paul Bremer has finally admitted at least two of them, and the president of the United States needs to tell the truth to the American people," Mr. Kerry told several hundred supporters in a school gym. "I don't know if the president is constitutionally incapable of acknowledging the truth, I don't know if he's just so stubborn that he's going to go down."

    In addition to the Bremer speeches, Mr. Kerry quoted remarks made Monday by the secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, that he had not "seen any strong, hard evidence that links" Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Mr. Rumsfeld later issued a statement backing away from his comment, which he said "regrettably was misunderstood."

    Mr. Kerry said, "Commander in chief means you have to make judgments that protect the troops and accomplish the mission. I would listen to all of my advisers and make the best judgment possible. I can tell you this: General Shinseki asked for more troops, and he was fired. So that's a surefire way to chill a lot of other people from asking for things later."

    General Eric K. Shinseki, then Army chief of staff, testified before the war that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed in Iraq afterward; he was contradicted by other Pentagon officials. General Shinseki was not fired but had difficult relations with the Pentagon's civilian leadership and was pushed into retiring at the end of his four-year term in 2003.

    At the Pentagon, officials said that Mr. Bremer, while interested in the issue of security, had no authority over troop levels, which was solely the purview of military commanders. "Any views Mr. Bremer may have expressed regarding the capabilities and levels of U.S. forces in Iraq would have been referred to the military commanders and the chairman and members of the Joint Chiefs for their review and consideration," said Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman.

    "Before, during and subsequent to Mr. Bremer's tenure, the military commanders and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed that the level of U.S. forces in Iraq was the appropriate level, and that was their recommendation to the secretary of defense," Mr. Di Rita said.

    In a speech on Monday to an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., Mr. Bremer said, "We never had enough troops on the ground" to stop the widespread looting immediately after the fall of Baghdad and the lawlessness and insurrection that followed. The group released portions of his remarks after the speech.

    At DePauw University, Mr. Bremer said that "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. He said that he raised his concerns a number of times within the administration, but that he "should have been even more insistent."

    His remarks there were posted on the DePauw Web site.

    Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, seemed to suggest in a briefing for reporters on Tuesday that Mr. Bremer had never raised his concerns about troop levels with Mr. Bush, but Mr. McClellan did not entirely rule out that such a conversation had occurred.

    "They met on a regular basis, I don't remember that Ambassador Bremer ever talked about that, but we never got into the habit of reading out any of those discussions," Mr. McClellan said.

    Mr. Bremer served for more than a year in Iraq, up until the handover of power on June 28.

    In his remarks in Iowa, Mr. Kerry cited Bremer's speeches as more evidence of what he called the administration's wrong course in Iraq.

    Mr. Kerry said the administration had made "a long list of mistakes" in Iraq, and added that Mr. Bremer had admitted to two of them; that "we didn't deploy enough troops to get the job done, and, two, we didn't contain the violence after Saddam was deposed."

    In an e-mailed statement quoted by The Washington Post, Mr. Bremer said that he fully supported the administration's course in Iraq.

    Mr. Bremer's remarks in his two speeches were considerably at odds with Mr. Bremer's previous public statements about Iraq.

    In an interview on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" on July 20, 2003, not quite 11 weeks after he arrived in Baghdad, Mr. Bremer was asked if the United States needed more troops in Iraq.

    "I do not believe we do," Mr. Bremer replied. "I think the military commanders are confident we have enough troops on the ground, and I accept that analysis."

 

---

    Go to Original

    Kerry Urges Bush to Admit Mistakes
    By Dan Balz and Robin Wright
    The Washington Post

    Wednesday 06 October 2004

Democrat says president should give Americans a full accounting of situation in Iraq.

    Tipton, Iowa - Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry, seizing on criticism of the Bush administration's Iraq policy by the former U.S. governor in Baghdad, called on President Bush Tuesday to acknowledge major mistakes in judgment and give Americans a full accounting of what has gone wrong in Iraq.

    Kerry questioned whether either Bush or Vice President Cheney is capable of acknowledging errors or correcting U.S. policy, after former U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer said Monday that the United States needed more troops after the invasion to stabilize Iraq and stop the looting and violence that fostered the lawlessness that still plagues the country. Kerry said both men should be held accountable for misleading the United States about the war.

    "For weeks I've been asking the president of the United States to level with the American people and to be candid about the situation in Iraq and about what we face," Kerry said while campaigning in rural Iowa. "Maybe he's simply unwilling to face the truth or to share it with the American people, but the president's stubbornness has prevented him from seeing, each step of the way, the difficulties and the ways we best protect our troops and best accomplish this mission."

    Bremer's comments triggered widespread political fallout and escalated public debate over U.S. policy in Iraq. They also reflected the growing number of challenges from key government quarters about the Bush administration's original assessments of Iraq and justifications for invading.

    In an effort at damage control, the administration disclosed yesterday that top U.S. officials handling Iraq were split over troop strength. After two years of denying internal divisions, the administration confirmed that Bremer had pushed for additional troops. The statement acknowledging the divide, however, came not from the White House but from the Bush-Cheney campaign.

    "Ambassador Bremer differed with the commanders in the field," campaign spokesman Brian Jones said. "That is his right, but the president has always said that he will listen to his commanders on the ground and give them the support they need for victory." The statement implicitly distanced the White House from Bremer, who was once considered a leading contender to become secretary of state in a second Bush administration.

    "This consistency stands in stark contrast to the shifting positions of John Kerry, who voted for the war, voted against the troops for political gain, said the war was the 'right decision' and said it was the 'wrong war,' " Jones added.

    Senior former military officials in Iraq, experts on Iraq and Republican foreign policy analysts strongly endorsed Bremer's comments on troops in speeches about his 14 months in Iraq. "It was certainly a well-accepted notion with the Coalition Provisional Authority among the military staff that we did not have enough troops there to do what was necessary," said Army Col. Paul Hughes, a National Defense University fellow who served in Iraq.

    "Bremer is the most impeccable source on this. He was in the position to confirm what was self-evident from common sense -- that the chaos and looting could have been avoided if we had far more of the correct forces in the country at the end of the fighting," said Geoffrey Kemp, a Reagan administration National Security Council staff member now at the Nixon Center.

    Pentagon planning had originally called for an additional division of U.S. troops in Iraq, according to military officials who were in Iraq. A fourth division -- the 17,000-strong 1st Cavalry Division, the Army's premier heavy armored unit -- could have "cleaned out the nest of vipers" bypassed en route to Baghdad, Hughes said.

    "In our haste and because we lacked sufficient resources, we couldn't do more than go for the head of the snake," said Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst now at the National Defense University. "It's not that it was a bad military strategy. It probably saved a lot of fighting, but it didn't ensure security or save the population from the remnants of Saddam's regime that we are now fighting."

    Pentagon spokesman Lawrence T. DiRita said Bremer was "understandably interested in -- but not in charge of -- security issues." Before, during and after Bremer's tour in Iraq, commanders in the field and at the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington concurred that the troop level was "appropriate," DiRita said in a written statement.

    The latest controversy over U.S. policy decisions was triggered by Bremer's comments in recent speeches at DePauw University and at an insurance conference. In addition to saying the United States erred by deploying an insufficient number of troops and in not containing the early violence, he said Washington planned for the wrong postwar problems, focusing on potential humanitarian and refugee crises that did not materialize rather than on an insurgency that did.

    Neither Bremer nor the administration has said when he asked that more troops be deployed. Bremer denied twice last year -- on NBC's "Meet the Press" in July 2003 and ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" in August 2003 -- that he did so. "I never made a request for more troops," Bremer told ABC. "I agree with the Centcom commander, John Abizaid, who said earlier this week in a press conference that he believes we have enough troops here. I think that's right."

    The debate over U.S. troop strength predates the war. In his memoir, retired Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who commanded the invasion force, said Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called him in September 2002 to express concern that the invasion force would be too small.

    Kerry, under fire from the Bush campaign for months over his positions on Iraq, is seeking to undermine Bush's credibility on Iraq and to turn the election, in part, into a referendum on the president's handling of the war.

    "There are a long list of mistakes, and I'm glad that Paul Bremer has admitted at least two of them, and the president of the United States needs to tell the truth to the American people," Kerry said in Iowa. "I don't know if the president is constitutionally incapable of acknowledging the truth. I don't know if he's just so stubborn."

    With the Bush campaign pitting Bremer against military commanders, Kerry was asked whose judgment he would rely on for military advice if he were elected: the uniformed military officers or civilian leaders.

    "When you're president of the United States, you're commander in chief," he said. "That's why you have that title. Commander in chief means you have to make judgments that protect the troops and accomplish the mission. I would listen to all of my advisers and make the best judgment possible. I can tell you this: General [Eric K.] Shinseki [the former Army chief of staff] asked for more troops, and he was fired. So that's a surefire way to chill a lot of other people from asking for things later."

 

---

    Go to Original

    Bremer: 'We Never Had Enough Troops'
    By Jim Miklaszewski
    NBC News

    Tuesday 05 October 2004

Comments force Bush Administration to defend post-war actions.

    Ambassador Paul Bremer, who ran the U.S. provisional government in Iraq for more than a year, now claims the U.S. military should have had more troops in Iraq to halt the widespread looting after the fall of Baghdad.

    "We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness.  We never had enough troops on the ground," Bremer said Monday at a conference in West Virginia.

    After leaving Iraq last June, Bremer said much the same on the "Today" show.

    "Obviously, it would have been better if we could have had more security sooner. No question about that," Bremer told NBC's Matt Lauer.

    But last month in a speech at DePauw University in Indiana, Bremer went even further saying: "The single most important change would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the U.S. occupation.

    But when Bremer was in Iraq he ordered that the Iraqi Army - which could have contributed to security - be disbanded.

    Bremer claims he repeatedly raised the troop issue within the administration, and if he had been more insistent, the situation in Iraq might be better today.

    But a senior Pentagon official tells NBC News that to his knowledge Bremer didn't raise the troop issue until shortly before he left Iraq last June. And at the White House Tuesday, National Security Adviser Condeleezza Rice told NBC News she can't recall whether Bremer ever raised his concerns with President Bush, but added the president gave his commanders all the troops they said they needed.

    "The point is, that whenever the president talked to his military commanders, he told them, 'whatever you need, more troops, whatever you need - you just let me know, you'll have them,'" says Rice.

    Reached by telephone Tuesday, Bremer told NBC News he was not granting interviews because he was in the process of writing a book. But his latest remarks about U.S. troop levels have already become part of the heated political debate over the war in Iraq.

  -------

  Jump to TO Features for Thursday October 7, 2004   

Today's TO Features -------------- Steve Weissman | Stop Thinking, and See What You're Told Misleading Assertions Cover Iraq War and Voting Records Bremer Critique on Iraq Raises Political Furor C.I.A. Report Casts Doubt on Terrorist's Iraqi Ties Probe into Iraq's Oil-for-Food Program to Reach White House NATO Expects Rush of Taliban Attacks in Afghanistan Wildlife Protection Standards Waived Under OSCE's Eye to Conjure Away 2000 "Nightmare" Michael Schwartz | The Opiate of the Electorate Iraq Chief Gives a Sobering View about Security U.S. Vetoes Resolution for Israel to Halt Gaza Operations U.S. Airstrikes Build Iraqi Support for al-Zarqawi U.S. Report Finds No Evidence of Iraq WMD Nicholas D. Kristof | Beaten Afghan Brides Report to Say Iraq Posed Little Immediate Threat Cheney v. Edwards: The Full Debate Transcript Edwards Shoots And Scores William Rivers Pitt: Cheney's Avalanche of Lies t r u t h o u t  Home

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

  Print This Story  E-mail This Story

© : t r u t h o u t 2004