US did not have enough troops in Iraq: Bremer

WASHINGTON, Oct 5 (AFP) - The United States did not have enough troops in Iraq to secure the country and paid a heavy price for the mistake, the former head of the US civilian administration in Baghdad has said in comments that sparked a new debate Tuesday on the Iraq war.
Paul Bremer made the comments in a speech Monday that contradicted assertions by President George W. Bush and top Defence Department officials that the US military had everything it needed to secure Iraq.
Bremer`s comments came as a new blow to White House defence of the Iraq war, after Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a speech he had seen no "strong, hard evidence" linking former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.
Bremer said: "We never had enough troops on the ground."
He told a conference of insurance professionals in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia that he arrived in Baghdad in May 2003 to find "horrid" looting because of the lack of patrols.
"We paid a big price for not stopping it, because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," Bremer said, according to a transcript of his comments released by organisers of the conference.
In a statement sent to The Washington Post late Monday, Bremer stressed his support for the US strategy in Iraq, however.
"I believe that we currently have sufficient troop levels in Iraq," he said, noting that his references to troop levels referred to May 2003, "when I believed we needed either more coalition troops or Iraqi security forces to address the looting."
Bremer raised similar concerns about troop levels at a forum at DePauw University in Indiana on September 16, according to a transcript released by the university.
"The single most important change -- the one thing that would have improved the situation -- would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout," Bremer was quoted as saying.
"Although I raised this issue a number of times with our government, I should have been even more insistent," he said.
The White House reacted to the new storm over Iraq by suggesting that Bremer had never raised his worries with Bush. But spokesman Scott McClellan did not make a categorical denial.
McClellan said: "They met on a regular basis. I don`t remember that Ambassador Bremer ever talked about that, but we never got into the habit of reading out any of those discussions."
The spokesman went on: "Ambassador Bremer himself has also repeatedly said that he is not a military planner and when the issue of troop levels arose, he referred to military commanders in the field for these decisions."
With Iraq now a key issue in the campaign for the November 2 presidential election, Democratic contender John Kerry praised Bremer and called on Bush to "acknowledge" US errors in Iraq.
Speaking in Tipton, Iowa, Kerry said "just today we have learned that America`s top official who was responsible for managing the coalition provisional authority has acknowledged two big mistakes."
Kerry said he hoped that, when vice presidential candidates John Edwards and Dick Cheney, the Republican incumbent, hold a debate later Tuesday, "Mr. Cheney can acknowledge those mistakes.
"I hope Mr Cheney can take responsibility," he said.
During a debate between Kerry and Bush last week, the Democrat insisted the administration had ignored pre-war advice on troop numbers, even from top military professionals, including former army chief of staff general Eric Shinseki.
Bremer`s remarks drew a stark contrast with repeated upbeat statements by Bush, Rumsfeld and other top administration officials, who have consistently insisted the United States had enough forces in Iraq.
About 133,000 US troops are currently deployed in Iraq, forming the bulk of an international coalition that toppled Saddam`s government. Other nations in the coalition have about 23,500 soldiers in Iraq.
Despite the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the main justification for the war, Bremer said he agreed with Bush`s decision to invade Iraq because there was a "real possibility" Saddam might have provided weapons to terrorist groups that had vowed to kill Americans.
"The status quo was simply untenable," he insisted, adding: "I am more than ever convinced that regime change was the right thing to do."