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US did not forsee insurgency
27/10/2004 09:51 - (SA)
Washington - United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has implicitly admitted the Pentagon had no specific plans for handling a widespread insurgency in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq, but still insisted US pre-war planning was "good."
The remarks, made on Tuesday in an interview with Cincinnati, Ohio, radio station, came amid a barrage of charges from Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and his aides that the White House had failed to adequately plan for the possibility of a guerrilla war in Iraq.
"The post-war plan ... was designed to see that they were not able to destroy their oil wells, that they were not able to blow up their bridges, that they did not have massive humanitarian crisis with internally displaced people and refugees and food crisis, and that the war was conducted in a speedy way so that it would not run the risk of destabilising neighbouring countries," Rumsfeld said when asked to comment on the accusations.
He said all those goals had been accomplished, but he did not mention guerrilla operations among the contingencies the military had planned for, and referred to them as a problem that was being handled on an ad hoc basis.
'Truth needs adapting'
"It is a truth that it requires continuously adapting what we're doing - our tactics and our strategies - to meet the problems on the ground, the security problem on the ground," Rumsfeld said.
The comments dovetailed with other indications that the administration of President George W Bush did not anticipate any serious resistance to US troops on the part of Iraqis following the overthrow of the government of Saddam Hussein.
Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson told CNN television last week that he had urged Bush, in a private meeting before the March 2003 invasion, to prepare the Americans for the prospect of high casualties.
Bush responded, "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties," according to Robertson.
More than 1 100 US troops have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of the war, most of them after the president declared an end of major combat operations in May 2003.
In the lead-up to the war, the Central Intelligence Agency was reportedly so convinced Iraqis would warmly greet US troops that it proposed smuggling hundreds of small American flags into Iraq ahead of the invasion to give Iraqis something to wave at the soldiers.
The CIA was then planning to capture the event on film and beam it throughout the Arab world, The New York Times reported last week, citing unnamed intelligence officials.
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