War Strategy Focused on Worst-Case Scenarios

U.S.-led coalition forces are still struggling to bring security to Iraq more than four months after the end of major combat because prewar planning focused instead on disasters that didn’t occur, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said here Saturday as he wrapped up a three-day visit.

War planners came up with strategies for dealing with environmental sabotage if oil wells were set on fire, communities were flooded by the destruction of dams or millions were displaced to create a humanitarian crisis, Rumsfeld said.

The peace is now also proving difficult to secure because battles were never fought north of Baghdad between Saddam Hussein loyalists and U.S. troops after the Iraqi capital fell. Hussein supporters in the north, rather than being defeated, “melded into the countryside,” he said.

“We spent a great deal of time thinking through and planning for a host of things -- terrible things -- that could have happened but did not happen,” Rumsfeld said of the prewar focus. “We planned for things that could have been serious, serious problems. As you go forward, you have to deal with the world as you find it.”

Still, Rumsfeld continued to portray the March invasion and subsequent occupation as a success in liberating Iraqis from Hussein’s repression.

“For all the difficulties, and there are certainly challenges, the Iraqi people are so much better off than four or five months ago,” he said after a visit where he spent limited time meeting with Iraqis.

Peppered with questions at a news conference about the Bush administration’s prewar statements about evidence that Iraq possessed and was ready to use chemical, nuclear or biological weapons, Rumsfeld hinted that proof would be forthcoming.

Teams of weapons inspectors combing the country and interrogating Iraqi scientists “are working diligently and professionally, and we all look forward to hearing what they have to say,” the Pentagon chief said.

Rumsfeld and the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, insisted that the coalition force, made up of nearly 170,000 troops, is sufficient to handle the daily incidents of sabotage and provocation.

In fact, Rumsfeld said, “flooding the zone” with two or three times the current troop level would increase the number of targets for pro-Hussein remnants and foreign terrorists and use up U.S. taxpayer money better spent on rebuilding.

Sanchez sought to downplay the daily attacks on U.S. soldiers as a problem he could handle with a few hundred troops if Iraqis were more forthcoming with tips.

“A platoon out of any one of my battalions could defeat the threat, readily. I don’t need any more forces. We need the Iraqi people to help us and give us the intelligence we need,” Sanchez said.

“There is no risk at the tactical, operational or strategic level,” he added. “The only way we will fail in this country is if we decide to walk away in Iraq and fight the next battle of the war on terrorism in America.”

Rumsfeld urged fledgling Iraqi police, civil defense forces, border guards and other new security bodies to take responsibility for their nation’s protection. He said that only domestic forces are capable of defending Iraq, and he accused Iraqi citizens of “pointing fingers at the security forces of the coalition” instead of coming forward with information on resisters and saboteurs.

Before his news conference with Bremer and Sanchez, Rumsfeld visited a mass grave site near the city of Hillah, south of Baghdad, where 3,000 victims of Hussein-era massacres were buried.

Rumsfeld also met with the commander of a newly deployed multinational division under Polish command based in Babylon.

As he had upon his arrival, Rumsfeld urged other nations to back the U.S.-led occupation force with fresh military reinforcements to make the postwar reconstruction effort “even broader.”