U.S. Was 'Clueless' on Counterinsurgency (says Paul Wolfowitz)

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Source: NYSun

WASHINGTON — Paul Wolfowitz, in his first public remarks on the Iraq war in years, said the American government was "pretty much clueless on counterinsurgency" in the first year of the war.

The former deputy secretary of defense said yesterday that the force sent to Iraq was adequate for fighting Saddam Hussein's military, citing the speed with which American troops toppled the regime. But Mr. Wolfowitz said no one in the Bush administration anticipated that Saddam would order his security services to wage an insurgency after their formal defeat on the battlefield.

Mr. Wolfowitz's remarks came at a forum for a new book, "War and Decision," by the former no. 3 official at the Pentagon, Douglas Feith. In the book, Mr. Feith argues that America's greatest mistake in the war was establishing a coalition provisional authority instead of installing a group of Iraqi exiles in an interim government until elections could be held.

Mr. Wolfowitz said he agreed with his old colleague. But his remarks yesterday have special relevance, because in the run-up to the war, the deputy secretary of defense downplayed testimony from a retired Army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, who told Congress that postwar stabilization operations would require several hundred thousand troops.

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"I think I said in my comments quoting Doug's book, no one anticipated this insurgency, a lot of people were slow to recognize it once it started," Mr. Wolfowitz said. "And I do think a real failure — I assign responsibility all over the place — was not having enough reliable Iraqi troops early enough and fast enough, because I think a sensible counterinsurgency strategy would not be to flood the country with 300,000 Americans, but rather to build up Iraqi forces among the population."

Read more: http://www2.nysun.com/article/75428

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/21/wcheney121.xml

In a 1994 television interview Mr Cheney, who was defence secretary in the 1990-91 Gulf War, said that it had been right not to seize Baghdad after driving Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait.

He said: "There would have been a US occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.

"Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off."