I Was A Scapegoat For Bush, Bremer Claims

I was scapegoat for Bush, Bremer claims

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story...683812,00.html

Jamie Wilson in Washington
Wednesday January 11, 2006
The Guardian

The Bush administration is under more pressure over its handling of the war in Iraq after Paul Bremer, the former head of the coalition provisional authority, claimed his request for more troops was rejected by the Pentagon and the White House.

Mr Bremer, the man most commonly associated with implementing postwar policies that led to the rise of the insurgency, has claimed that senior US military officials including the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, tried to make him a scapegoat for their failings.

In a memoir published this week, Mr Bremer says that from the time he took the job in May 2003, shortly after the fall of Baghdad, he had misgivings about coalition troop levels and raised the issue a number of times with administration officials, including George Bush.

He also defended his decision to disband the Iraqi army, often cited as one of the main reasons for the rise of the insurgency as it put out on the street a mass of trained but disgruntled men, saying most Iraqi units had disbanded in the wake of the invasion anyway and a recall would have ended up with a largely Sunni force.

Mr Bremer, a career diplomat, also attacks the US's allies, including Britain, for being "weak-kneed" and getting "cold feet" over plans to arrest the militant Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

In the memoir, titled My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope, Mr Bremer says he sent Mr Rumsfeld a copy of a report by a respected thinktank that estimated 500,000 troops would be needed to stabilise Iraq, but the defence secretary did not respond. Mr Rumsfeld also failed to respond to his recommendation in May 2004 to add 30,000 troops to the 160,000 in Iraq at the time.

Mr Bremer says he became so concerned about the issue of troop levels that he raised it with the president on a number of occasions, including at a lunch in June 2003 and in a video link with a national security council meeting chaired by Mr Bush. "I'm concerned we may be drawing down our forces here too soon," he says he told the president. "It's simply not enough to say that army and marine divisions will be replaced by forces from other countries."

In a passage that reiterates his claim, Mr Bremer rounds on Spanish forces for failing to support US troops under fire in Najaf. "They are sitting in tanks around the compound and doing nothing," he wrote, quoting from notes he made at the time. "It's a perfect outrage - I call it the 'coalition of the not-at-all-willing'."

In the book, Mr Bremer says the Pentagon was guilty of "institutional inertia" and blames Mr Rumsfeld and other military leaders for being determined to reduce US troop levels even in the face of the growing insurgency. "We've become the worst of all things: an ineffective occupier," he says he told Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser.

Mr Bremer pours scorn on the Iraqi exiles who formed the initial Iraqi governing council in 2003. "They couldn't organise a parade, let alone a country," he writes.