'Saddam not linked to Osama'
2004-10-05 07:53
New York - Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he does not expect civil war in Iraq and pointed to the recent retaking of the former insurgent stronghold of Samarra as evidence of progress in stabilising the country before elections in January.
"I don't think it's going to happen," Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday when asked about the threat of civil war. "But what has to be done in that country is what basically was done in Samarra over the last 48 hours."
Rumsfeld credited a process of first trying diplomacy, then threatening force and finally using it.
On whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the war, Rumsfeld said flatly on Monday that intelligence about such weapons before the invasion was faulty - a markedly different statement than what he told a television interviewer just a day earlier.
'World is a lot better'
"It turns out that we have not found weapons of mass destruction," Rumsfeld said on Monday in the speech to the foreign affairs group. "Why the intelligence proved wrong I'm not in a position to say, but the world is a lot better off with Saddam Hussein in jail."
In an interview aired Sunday on the Fox News Channel, Rumsfeld had said he believed Saddam, the deposed Iraqi president, had weapons of mass destruction before the war, and the truth may unfold over months or years.
"I believe they were there, and I'm surprised we have not found them yet," Rumsfeld said in the Fox interview. "He has either hidden them so well or moved them somewhere else, or decided to destroy them ... in event of a conflict but kept the capability of developing them rapidly."
Asked to describe the connection between Saddam and the al-Qaeda terror network, the Pentagon chief first refused to answer, then said: "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two."
'Regrettably misunderstood'
Several hours after his appearance, Rumsfeld issued a statement from the Pentagon saying his comment on al-Qaeda and Saddam "regrettably was misunderstood" by some. He said he has acknowledged since September 2002 that there were ties between Osama bin Laden's terror group and Iraq.
"This assessment was based upon points provided to me by then-CIA Director George Tenet to describe the CIA's understanding of the al-Qaeda relationship," he said. This included "solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad," he said.
In his New York remarks, Rumsfeld said he had seen intelligence on the Saddam-al-Qaeda question "migrate in amazing ways" in the past year, adding that there were "many differences of opinion in the intelligence community." He did not elaborate on that but said relationships among terrorists "evolve and change over time."
- AP