Rumsfeld Says Troop Losses Unexpected

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld acknowledged Thursday that he had not anticipated that American forces in Iraq still would be suffering so many casualties one year after the invasion and said he regretted having to extend the deployment of 20,000 troops.

Asked what mistakes he had made in the conduct of the war in Iraq, Rumsfeld said, “I certainly would not have estimated that we would have had the number of individuals lost ... that we have had lost in the last week.”

Assumptions of lower casualties guided commanders’ decisions on how many troops to send into Iraq -- decisions that were countermanded this week after what Rumsfeld called “a tough period of days in Iraq.” More than 80 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq combat since the beginning of April, and nearly 700 since the start of the invasion.

To respond to the unexpected violence, Rumsfeld this week approved keeping about 20,000 exiting troops in Iraq for at least three more months as U.S.-led coalition forces seek to quell a Shiite Muslim uprising in southern Iraq and a stubborn assault in the predominantly Sunni Muslim towns of Fallouja and Ramadi to the west of Baghdad. If more troops are needed after that, the Pentagon plans to send in replacements, Rumsfeld said.

Rumsfeld’s comments contrasted with those of President Bush, who was unable to cite a specific mistake when asked during a news conference Tuesday. In answering a similar question, Rumsfeld said Thursday that many things had gone as planned.

“Conversely, if someone had said, ‘Would you, a year ago, have expected you would be where you are at the present time?’ ... one would not have described where we are.”

Rumsfeld’s assessment came as U.S. generals in Iraq were becoming increasingly pessimistic that a tenuous cease-fire in Fallouja would hold. And an Iranian delegation traveled to the holy Iraqi city of Najaf in an attempt to defuse a standoff between Americans and militiamen loyal to a firebrand Shiite cleric.

The secretary’s remarks, among the first from the Bush administration to suggest a possible miscalculation, are likely to fuel criticism by Democrats and others who have said the administration’s forecasts have been inaccurate in nearly every major respect other than the swift success of the initial invasion. They included expectations that Iraqis would pose only minor military resistance, allowing a quick and comparatively inexpensive occupation by U.S. troops.

Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the likely Democratic presidential candidate, who criticized the administration for a lack of planning and the effect of altered plans on troops, seized on Rumsfeld’s comment that troops could be moved around in Iraq because “people are fungible.”

“Secretary Rumsfeld’s comment that ‘people are fungible’ is further indication of this administration’s continuing disregard for the men and women who put their lives on the line every day in Iraq,” Kerry said. “Secretary Rumsfeld has it wrong. Troops are not chess pieces to be moved on a board, they are real people with families and loved ones who depend on them.”

Kerry charged that the administration had failed to equip troops with adequate body and vehicle armor and criticized the decision to extend combat service beyond the one-year limit troops had been promised.

“Our troops are asked to serve in an action where the administration can’t even tell them what the plan is to move forward,” Kerry said.

Michael O’Hanlon, a former defense policy analyst with the Congressional Budget Office, called planning for events following the invasion “atrocious.”

“The State Department, most think tanks in Washington and anybody who remembered previous wars in the Middle East knew the potential for guerrilla-like conflict,” said O’Hanlon, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “That is the part that was so badly botched that I think it will forever tarnish Rumsfeld’s reputation as secretary of defense.”

Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, denied that missteps in planning led to the high casualties of the last week, saying the plan was flexible enough to allow the coalition to respond quickly. Pace blamed the surge in attacks against U.S. troops on insurgents seeking to make an impact before the hand-over of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government at the end of June.

One in four soldiers affected by the orders to remain in Iraq are National Guard or Reserve troops. The extended use of reservists, who accounted for 40% of the U.S. troops in Iraq last year and 30% this year, has led to concerns that recruitment and retention numbers will decline.

The extension was the most recent move to beef up a force that U.S. officials had hoped only months ago would be getting smaller during the spring.

In Fallouja, meanwhile, insurgents wearing bulletproof vests and driving cars plundered from police stations continued Thursday to pepper Marines with mortar, rocket and rifle fire.

The patience of the American commanders there was clearly growing short, and they prepared to resume the operation aimed at finding those who killed and mutilated four American civilian contractors late last month.

“They are not living up to their side of the bargain,” Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division from Camp Pendleton, said of the fighters in Fallouja. “We are not going to continually take these attacks. The moment will come when we will take decisive action.”

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed. “We have to prepare ourselves, that there may be some additional fighting in Fallouja,” he said at a Baghdad news conference.

The tougher American rhetoric came even as news spread in Fallouja that Iraqi police would be returning to work as part of the cease-fire, said an Iraqi Islamic Party member there.

Marines at the outskirts of Fallouja remained tense Thursday. Two insurgent rockets struck a Jordanian-run hospital nearby, sending patients fleeing from a diagnostic clinic and wounding a security guard. The hospital issued a statement blaming the attack on fighting between “the Iraqi people” and Americans.

Marines have continued to search homes in Fallouja and are digging a trench to isolate the city further. Searching one home Thursday, they noticed a large mirror was awry; it hid a storeroom loaded with rifles, explosives vests, rocket launchers and land mines.

“It was an extraordinary find,” said Col. John Toolan. “It tells me that someone is moving a lot of good gear into here and we have to find some way to block this.”

But the dangers of more aggressive forays into the city were evident Thursday as yet another prominent, pro-U.S. figure -- Ibrahim Jafari, a Shiite Muslim member of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council -- condemned the operations in Fallouja. Several other council members, mainly Sunnis sympathetic to residents of the Sunni Triangle area where Fallouja lies, have already condemned the American offensive.

“The severe reaction by the Americans to what happened in Fallouja affected these innocent civilians,” Jafari said.

In the southern city of Najaf, firebrand cleric Muqtada Sadr continued to issue contradictory statements about his willingness to negotiate with the U.S.-led occupation, even as some American troops were ordered to pull back in an attempt to ease tensions.

It remained unclear just what the Iranian negotiating team hoped to accomplish when it entered Najaf on Thursday. The top spokesman for the American civilian authority that runs Iraq denied reports that the U.S. had asked its onetime enemy to intervene. “They’re certainly not here at our request,” Dan Senor said of the Iranians.

But State Department spokesman Richard Boucher made it clear that the United States was willing to accept Iranian help in solving the dispute. He emphasized that any negotiations should be done in conjunction with Iraqi officials.

“It is appropriate for them to try to work with the authorities in Baghdad, to try to work with the Iraqis who are in leadership roles, as we have and others have, to try to help stabilize the situation and bring whatever influence to bear that they can,” Boucher said.

As the Najaf mission began, an Iranian diplomat was gunned down on the streets of Baghdad in an apparent assassination. The dead man was identified as the mission’s first secretary, Khalil Naimi. It was unclear whether there was any connection with the Najaf delegation’s arrival.

In Baghdad, Senor and other officials reiterated the U.S. demands that Sadr surrender to a murder warrant, disband his militia and leave seized government buildings.

Yet even as the ultimatums were repeated, some of the troops that had rushed to Najaf last week were being pulled back to their original positions. Senior military officials have said they want to avoid combat in Najaf, home to one of Islam’s holiest shrines.

The pullback Thursday of elements of the Army’s 1st Infantry Division was an indication that any serious fighting was at least several days away.

“Senior leadership just wants to get the right people in the right spot,” said Lt. Col. David Miller, commander of the 1st Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, which was returning to its base in Baqubah. “It’s tough to come all this way and not finish the job, but if we can’t do this, then we are not as flexible and adaptable as we claim to be.”

Hendren reported from Washington and Perry from Fallouja. Times staff writers Maura Reynolds in Washington, Alissa J. Rubin and Nicholas Riccardi in Baghdad and Edmund Sanders near Najaf contributed to this report.