A SENIOR BRITISH GENERAL ON RUMMY & THE WAR

Army chief attacks US over Iraq
By Con Coughlin and Neil Tweedie

Last Updated: 1:56am BST 01/09/2007

General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the British Army during the invasion of Iraq, has launched a scathing attack on the United States for the way it handled the post-war administration of the country.

The former chief of the general staff said the approach taken by Donald Rumsfeld, the then US defence secretary, was "intellectually bankrupt", describing his claim that US forces "don't do nation-building" as "nonsensical".

Sir Mike, who took command of the British Army one month before US-led forces invaded Iraq, said Mr Rumsfeld was "one of those most responsible for the current situation in Iraq".

[NOTE: The Claremont Institute, a wingnut hatchery, plans to honor Rummy this November]

Crucially, the general writes, he refused to deploy enough troops to maintain law and order after the collapse of Saddam's regime, and discarded detailed plans for the post-conflict administration of Iraq that had been drawn up by the US State Department.

Sir Mike says the failure of the US-led coalition to suppress the Iraqi insurgency four years after Saddam's overthrow was down to the Pentagon's refusal to deploy enough troops. A combined force of 400,000 would be needed to control a country the size of Iraq, but even with the extra troops recently deployed for the US military's "surge" the coalition has struggled to reach half that figure.

[NOTE: This is what Gen. Shinseki was calling for]

Sir Mike is particularly critical of President Bush's decision to hand control of the post-invasion running of Iraq to the Pentagon, when all the post-war planning had been done by the State Department.

[NOTE: According to Thomas Ricks in Fiasco, Cheney did not want State experts Warrick and O'Sullivan involved in the post-war planning]

"All the planning carried out by the State Department went to waste," he writes. For Mr Rumsfeld and his neo-conservative supporters "it was an ideological article of faith that the coalition forces would be accepted as a liberating army.

He and other senior British officers were opposed to the Pentagon's decision to disband the Iraqi army after Saddam's overthrow, a decision he says "was very short-sighted … We should have kept the Iraqi security services in being and put them under the command of the coalition."

Sir Mike also reveals that he and other senior officers had doubts about the weapons of mass destruction dossier presented by the Blair government in late 2002.

"Its release caused a stir in military circles," reveals Sir Mike, particularly the suggestion that the UK could face a threat of attack at 45 minutes' notice. "We all knew that it was impossible for Iraq to threaten the UK mainland. Saddam's Scud missiles could barely have reached our bases on Cyprus, and certainly no more distant target."