Perle: Rumsfeld Opposed, Powell Wanted Occupation Newsmax Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2004
Secretary Colin Powell, the State Department and the CIA - not Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - are responsible for the chaos that has grown out of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, says Richard Perle, the former chairman of Pentagon's Defense Policy Review Board. Appearing on Fox News' "O'Reilly Factor" Monday night, Perle said the U.S. made a most serious mistake after Iraq was liberated and the "keys" were not handed over immediately to Iraqis to run their own country. Thus, the U.S. military became an occupying force - and an increasibly unpopular one. "We didn't hand the keys over to the Iraqis. Instead we embarked on what became an extended occupation. That was fundamentally mistaken - it was politically driven," Perle said. Perle's remarks places significant distance between postwar policies and neo-conservatives like himself who have backed the war and have been championed in the Bush administration by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and Vice President Cheney. Perle told O'Reilly the idea of a military occupation was not the Pentagon's original plan. "It was not Don Rumsfeld's decision," he said. Asked by O'Reilly if handing the keys over to the Iraqis after deposing Saddam would have sparked a civil war between the Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites, Perle said he didn't think so. He noted that there were already groups of anti-Saddam Iraqis in place when the dictator fell. "There was an umbrella group of opposition figures. It included Shia, Sunnis, Kurds and in the end, of course, we did turn to the Iraqis. We asked them to form a governing council, then an interim government, but we made the big mistake of not trusting the Iraqis. "I'm not saying that everything would have worked out, but everything certainly didn't work out the way we did it. My own view is we should have supported a government in exile even before going into Iraq." O'Reilly asked how much responsibility Rumsfeld bears for the current situation in Iraq. "I think the conduct of the war was brilliant," Perle observed. "The campaign will go down in history as one of the greatest military campaigns ever. Saddam was removed and his regime fell within three weeks. "The problems didn't start immediately after Saddam's removal. The problems started when the occupation began to wear on the people, and that was predictable." When O'Reilly cited Colin Powell as a dissenting voice who warned the president that if "you break it [Iraq], you'll own it," Perle said, "the irony is that it was Secretary Powell and some others who wanted the extended occupation. They are the ones who did not want to turn things over to the Iraqis, who feared and distrusted the Iraqis and blocked all efforts to do precisely that." Perle then revealed that even before the war Rumsfeld's Department of Defense had argued that we should train thousands of Iraqis "to go in with us so that we wouldn't be the aggressor, we wouldn't be the occupying power, and those proposals were blocked largely by the State Department and the CIA. Rumsfeld was never able to get approval for the political strategy that might well have saved us from much of the subsequent trouble." Responding to O'Reilly's remark that the we are now seen as the "bad guys," Perle said that the situation in Iraq can be cleaned up. "Remember, we were portrayed as the bad guys when the only policy for dealing with Saddam were sanctions and the argument was that Iraqi babies were dying as result of the sanctions. We're making real progress and the political evolution is critical. There is a desperate effort now to cope with the fact that after these elections the Iraqis will be fully invested in their own future, and I think we've already begun to turn the corner." http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/11/30/80903.shtml
