Iraq

Defense official admits prewar errors

WASHINGTON - A Pentagon architect of the Iraq war said Tuesday that the Defense Department underestimated its enemy, failing to predict how resilient Saddam Hussein's government would be.

In a rare admission of prewar miscalculations, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz also said it's impossible to say how long a large American military force will have to stay in Iraq after political power is handed to Iraqis on June 30.

Wolfowitz spoke at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, the latest called by lawmakers worried about the Bush administration's handling of the war and reconstruction and about its plans.

Answering a question about miscalculations made in the campaign, Wolfowitz said: "Of all the things that were underestimated, the one that almost no one that I know of predicted ... was to properly estimate the resilience of the regime."

He said that included the failure "to properly estimate that Saddam Hussein would still be out there funding attacks on Americans until he was captured; that one of his principal deputies, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, would still be out there funding operations against us; that they would have hundreds of millions of dollars in bank accounts in neighboring countries to support those operations"; and that the old intelligence service would keep fighting.

Wolfowitz also said U.S. officials were wrong to impose so severe a policy of de-Baathification, the decision to purge members of Hussein's Baath Party from the government. The move threw out of work thousands of teachers, military men and others, many of whom had been required to join the party for employment, and was blamed by some for not only boosting joblessness but helping fuel the insurgency.

The ban on former party members in public sector jobs was eased last month.

Wolfowitz is not the first Bush administration official to say that things had not gone as planned: Midway through a bloody April for U.S. forces in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld he had not expected so many recent American casualties.

Pressed by Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., on how long substantial numbers of U.S. troops will have to remain, Wolfowitz said he could not predict.

Occupation forces have signed up some 200,000 Iraqis for police, army, civil defense and other security jobs. Training has been slow, however, insurgent violence is on the rise and Iraqis remain far from capable of securing the country without the 160,000-member U.S.-led occupation forces.

Before the war, some military planners estimated all but 70,000 Americans could have been withdrawn by the end of 2003. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said since that he never thought that number was plausible.

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