Republican Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, had pointed to this debate in a September 5 appearance on NBC TV’s “Meet the Press” with moderator Tim Russert.
“Tim, on your show five or six months ago, I said we made a huge mistake in June of last year by not moving promptly to an interim Iraqi government,” Gingrich said. “Had we continued to move as we had planned to an Iraqi interim government and to using the Iraqi regular army in June of last year, we would be in a better shape today.”
Gingrich praised the way the invasion was carried out by the U.S. military, which, under the guidance of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, moved to Baghdad with lightning speed and with smaller and more agile military units than the first Gulf War, taking full advantage of modern weapons technology. His comments alluded to the fact that those in the Bush administration who argued for moving quickly to establish a new Iraqi regime and train a new Iraqi army, while keeping the U.S. forces there in the backdrop, took a back seat for a while to those like Secretary of State Colin Powell who advocated reliance on the U.S. occupation regime—headed by Bremer—to run the country in the first year.
“We paid a big price for not stopping [looting in Iraq right after the U.S. invasion] because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness,” Bremer said October 4, speaking to an insurance conference in West Virginia. “We never had enough troops on the ground.” At the same time, Bremer restated his support for Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. “I am more than ever convinced that regime change was the right thing to do,” he said.
Bremer was quick to underscore his support for Bush’s current strategy. “I believe that we currently have sufficient troop levels in Iraq,” he said in an October 4 e-mail statement, adding that winning the war in Iraq is an “integral part of fighting this war on terror” and that he “strongly supports” Bush’s reelection.
An editorial in the October 6 Wall Street Journal, titled “The Viceroy’s Apologia,” took Bremer to task for his statement on troop levels. The editorial asserted that Bremer never asked for more troops until two months before his departure from Iraq in June, after the interim government was sworn in.
“We heard about his request at the time, but didn’t think much about it after we learned that theater commander General John Abizaid was consulted and argued that it was better policy to train Iraqi forces to fill any void,” the Journal editors continued. “Judging by our ultimate goal of Iraqi independence, and the success that mixed Iraqi and U.S. battalions had retaking Samarra over the weekend, General Abizaid was right.” In July 2003, Abizaid replaced Gen. Thomas Franks as head of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees Washington’s operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In an Op-Ed column in the October 8 New York Times Bremer made it clear that the majority in the ruling class is now convinced that the installation of an Iraqi administration with a trained military under its control should have been a higher priority. “The administration, the military, and I all agreed that the coalition’s top priority was a broad, sustained effort to train Iraqis to take more responsibility for their own security,” he said.
Bremer pooh-poohed the attempts by Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry to use his statements to bolster the Democratic election campaign. “Mr. Kerry is free to quote my comments about Iraq,” Bremer said. “But for the sake of honesty he should also point out that I have repeatedly said… that President Bush made a correct and courageous decision to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s brutality, and that the president is correct to see the war in Iraq as a central front in the war on terrorism.”
Related articles:
After Samarra, U.S., Iraqi forces start sweeps in other Iraqi cities
U.S. military uses air power to wipe out militias in Fallujah
U.S. gov’t uses report by arms ‘inspector’ to buoy rationale for Iraq war
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