U.S. Defends Its Role in Iraq

WASHINGTON -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday that it would be wrong to characterize the situation in Iraq as a quagmire or a guerrilla campaign, despite suspected sabotage and the growing number of attacks on U.S. troops.

He described the assaults on U.S. soldiers as acts of terrorism, and argued that the unrest in Iraq parallels what has accompanied the formation of democracies in other countries, including the United States.

“If you want to call that a quagmire, do it. I don’t,” Rumsfeld said during a Pentagon news conference where he was questioned about comparisons of the situation in Iraq to the U.S. getting bogged down in Vietnam.

As Rumsfeld defended the U.S. role in Iraq, troops continued their raids against suspected loyalists of the former regime headed by Saddam Hussein. About 180 Iraqis have been detained in the latest sweeps, prompted in part by last week’s attacks that left six American and six British soldiers dead.

The violence has continued, but it has been directed against property in recent days. An ammunition dump reportedly exploded over the weekend, killing as many as 30 looters, officials said. An oil truck was also destroyed.

On the political front, the U.S. occupation also ran into difficulties.

Acting on allegations brought by Iraqi investigating authorities, U.S. forces Monday arrested and removed from office the American-appointed interim mayor of Najaf, a provincial capital about 90 miles south of Baghdad. The mayor, Abdul Munem, is accused of kidnapping, theft, intimidation and attacking a bank official, according to officials of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. Several of his aides were also implicated.

The arrest follows a fatwa, or religious edict, issued by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani opposing plans to select a national council to steer the country. Sistani is one of Iraq’s leading Shiite authorities and is considered a political moderate who has accommodated rebuilding efforts. Agence France-Presse news service reported that the fatwa demanded general elections prior to the selection of any council. The authority intends to appoint the council by the middle of July as a prelude to developing an Iraqi constitution.

Sistani, a powerful Shiite leader in a country where Shiites are a majority, said “there is no guarantee that such a convention will draft a constitution upholding the Iraqi people’s interests and expressing their national identity, founded on Islam and lofty social values.”

At his news conference, Rumsfeld noted that comparisons to Vietnam had been growing along with the violence, but he rejected the idea. During that war, the United States found itself unable to assure security while fighting local guerrillas aided by the North Vietnamese army. The press frequently used the word “quagmire” to describe the situation that claimed about 55,000 U.S. lives over more than a decade.

“There are so many cartoons where people, press people, are saying, ‘Is it Vietnam yet?’ hoping it is and wondering if it is. And it isn’t,” Rumsfeld said after a reporter used quagmire in a question. “It’s a different time. It’s a different era. It’s a different place,” he said.

Rumsfeld bristled at suggestions that the United States has been caught off-guard by continued eruptions of violence two months after the major fighting ended.

Even as he rejected terms that imply drawn-out U.S. involvement in Iraq, Rumsfeld acknowledged that the fighting “will not be over any time soon,” and that stepped up raids by U.S. forces in recent days will probably only slow, not stop, a wave of violence and unrest.

The number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq since the end of principal combat on May 1 has climbed to 23. An additional 41 have died in accidents or other noncombat circumstances. Two new casualties were added to the count over the weekend when American military search teams recovered the bodies of two soldiers who had gone missing earlier in the week.

“Unlike traditional adversaries that we’ve faced in wars past, who sign a surrender document [and] hand over their weapons, the remnants of the Baath regime and the Fedayeen death squads faded into the population and have reverted to a terrorist network,” Rumsfeld said.

He acknowledged that the failure to find Saddam Hussein and his two adult sons has hampered U.S. efforts.

“There are some who hope that [Hussein or his sons] might come back, because they were privileged during the period they were there,” Rumsfeld said. “There are also others who are fearful that he’ll come back or they’ll come back.”

Baath loyalists, including former members of the Special Security Organization and the Special Republican Guard, are among at least five groups responsible for the ongoing violence in the country, Rumsfeld said.

He blamed looters and criminals who were released from Iraqi prisons by the “tens of thousands” before and during the war for taking advantage of the lack of security in the country.

He also said that “busloads” of foreigners have poured into the country from Syria to attack and harass U.S. and allied forces. Still other hostile groups are “influenced by Iran,” Rumsfeld said. He did not elaborate.

“They’re all slightly different in why they’re there and what they’re doing,” Rumsfeld said. “That doesn’t make it anything like a guerrilla war, or an organized resistance.” Those attacking U.S. soldiers “are functioning much more like terrorists.”

“My personal view is that we’re in a war,” Rumsfeld said. “We’re in a global war on terrorism and there are people that don’t agree with that -- for the most part, terrorists.”

Other Bush administration officials described the ongoing violence similarly.

“We are not seeing a nationwide, coherent, organized resistance,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in a television interview Monday. “We’re seeing pockets of resistance -- criminals, looters, former members of the Baath Party, former members of the Hussein regime. But I don’t yet see, nor do any of my colleagues see, this as some nationwide organized resistance.”

The United States has about 156,000 of its own troops in Iraq at the moment, as well as about 12,000 from a handful of other countries, mainly Britain. An additional 8,000 foreign troops could be in Iraq by the end of summer, with new contributions from Poland and Britain.

Responding to criticism that the United States has had trouble securing commitments from other countries, Rumsfeld said that six other nations have agreed to send troops, and that the United States is in discussions with 14 other countries. He neither named them nor provided details on how many troops they would contribute.

Meanwhile in Iraq, U.S. officials put an optimistic spin on the dismissal and arrest of the Najaf mayor, Munem.

Far from being embarrassed by what they termed a flawed appointment, authority officials who briefed reporters said they were in some ways heartened that the criminal investigation against Munem was done by Iraqi judicial officials who then brought the charges to the occupying authorities.

“We put up our hands. Clearly we made a mistake with this chap,” one official with the U.S.-led administration said. “However, what is worth emphasizing is this is the first time in Iraq that individual citizens have been able to ... hold their own public officials to account. That’s something we welcome.”

The official said the coalition was willing to accept that mistakes would be made in the sometimes idiosyncratic appointment process so long as it allowed a way to bring more Iraqis into government more quickly than if they waited for a well-thought-out and more fail-safe system.

The job of selecting interim local and regional government officials here has been given to U.S. military commanders. They are given guidelines for the selection process but appear to act with great autonomy. Lt. Col. Chris Conlin of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force appointed Munem this spring, and it was a controversial choice in Najaf from the beginning.

Munem was not a well-known figure within the community, residents said at the time. The people of Najaf are fiercely local and proud of it, and they said they regarded Munem, who had lived in the city for a mere 20 years, as an interloper with a suspicious past. His opponents said his main qualifications for the mayor’s job seemed to be that he knew the Americans and -- virtually alone in the devout Shiite Muslim region -- wore a Western suit and tie.

Mohammed Rodha Salami, a spokesman for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said after the appointment that Munem was “pretending to represent the popular will.”

In Najaf, there were grumblings from the beginning of Munem’s brief rule that without American money and his own Kalashnikovs he would be out on the street with the rest of the region’s unemployed.

The charges against him were developed under the authority of Najaf’s chief judge, a holdover from the Hussein regime. The judge appointed a local prosecutor to investigate Munem. When the results of the investigation were brought to the chief judge, he took them to the coalition.

“This is a clear sign that the rule of law is returning to Islam,” a coalition official said.

The Pentagon also said Monday that five Syrian border guards wounded in a U.S. attack June 19 have been released to Syrian authorities after receiving medical attention. The Syrian government had reportedly lodged an official protest with Washington and had requested the return of the guards.