Perle: Rumsfeld Opposed, Powell Wanted Occupation

[R.A. Hettinga]

Remember what I said about the original estimate of only 50,000 men to take
down Iraq, with the next stop being Damascus?

:-)

Cheers,
RAH
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Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2004 8:03 a.m. EST

Perle: Rumsfeld Opposed, Powell Wanted Occupation

 Secretary Colin Powell, the State Department and the CIA - not Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - are responsible for the chaos that has grown
out of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, says Richard Perle, the former chairman
of Pentagon's Defense Policy Review Board.

 Appearing on Fox News' "O'Reilly Factor" Monday night, Perle said the U.S.
made a most serious mistake after Iraq was liberated and the "keys" were
not handed over immediately to Iraqis to run their own country.

Thus, the U.S. military became an occupying force - and an increasingly
unpopular one.

 "We didn't hand the keys over to the Iraqis. Instead we embarked on what
became an extended occupation. That was fundamentally mistaken - it was
politically driven," Perle said.

 Perle's remarks places significant distance between postwar policies and
neo-conservatives like himself who have backed the war and have been
championed in the Bush administration by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, his
deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and Vice President Cheney.

Perle told O'Reilly the idea of a military occupation was not the
Pentagon's original plan.

 "It was not Don Rumsfeld's decision," he said.

 Asked by O'Reilly if handing the keys over to the Iraqis after deposing
Saddam would have sparked a civil war between the Sunnis, Kurds and
Shiites, Perle said he didn't think so. He noted that there were already
groups of anti-Saddam Iraqis in place when the dictator fell.

 "There was an umbrella group of opposition figures. It included Shia,
Sunnis, Kurds and in the end, of course, we did turn to the Iraqis. We
asked them to form a governing council, then an interim government, but we
made the big mistake of not trusting the Iraqis.

 "I'm not saying that everything would have worked out, but everything
certainly didn't work out the way we did it. My own view is we should have
supported a government in exile even before going into Iraq."

 O'Reilly asked how much responsibility Rumsfeld bears for the current
situation in Iraq.

 "I think the conduct of the war was brilliant," Perle observed. "The
campaign will go down in history as one of the greatest military campaigns
ever. Saddam was removed and his regime fell within three weeks.

 "The problems didn't start immediately after Saddam's removal. The
problems started when the occupation began to wear on the people, and that
was predictable."

 When O'Reilly cited Colin Powell as a dissenting voice who warned the
president that if "you break it [Iraq], you'll own it," Perle said, "the
irony is that it was Secretary Powell and some others who wanted the
extended occupation. They are the ones who did not want to turn things over
to the Iraqis, who feared and distrusted the Iraqis and blocked all efforts
to do precisely that."

 Perle then revealed that even before the war Rumsfeld's Department of
Defense had argued that we should train thousands of Iraqis "to go in with
us so that we wouldn't be the aggressor, we wouldn't be the occupying
power, and those proposals were blocked largely by the State Department and
the CIA. Rumsfeld was never able to get approval for the political strategy
that might well have saved us from much of the subsequent trouble."

 Responding to O'Reilly's remark that the we are now seen as the "bad
guys," Perle said that the situation in Iraq can be cleaned up.

 "Remember, we were portrayed as the bad guys when the only policy for
dealing with Saddam were sanctions and the argument was that Iraqi babies
were dying as result of the sanctions. We're making real progress and the
political evolution is critical. There is a desperate effort now to cope
with the fact that after these elections the Iraqis will be fully invested
in their own future, and I think we've already begun to turn the corner."


-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'