US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has implicitly admitted the Pentagon had no specific plans for handling a widespread insurgency in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq, but still insisted US pre-war planning was "good."
The remarks, made on Tuesday in an interview with Cincinnati, Ohio, radio station, came amid a barrage of charges by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and his aides that the White House had failed to adequately plan for the possibility of a guerrilla war in Iraq.
"The postwar plan ... was designed to see that they were not able to destroy their oil wells, that they were not able to blow up their bridges, that they did not have massive humanitarian crisis with internally displaced people and refugees and food crisis, and that the war was conducted in a speedy way so that it would not run the risk of destabilizing neighboring countries," Rumsfeld said when asked to comment on the accusations.
He said all those goals had been accomplished, but he did not mention guerrilla operations among the contingencies the military had planned for, and referred to them as a problem being handled on an ad hoc basis.
"It is a truth that it requires continuously adapting what we're doing - our tactics and our strategies - to meet the problems on the ground, the security problem on the ground," Rumsfeld said.
The comments dovetailed with other indications that the administration of President George W. Bush did not anticipate any serious resistance to US troops on the part of Iraqis following the overthrow of the government of Saddam Hussein.
Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson told CNN television last week that he had urged Bush, in a private meeting before the March 2003 invasion, to prepare the Americans for the prospect of high casualties.
Bush responded, "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties," according to Robertson.
More than 1,100 US troops have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of the war, most of them after the president declared an end of major combat operations in May 2003.
In the lead-up to the war, the Central Intelligence Agency was reportedly so convinced Iraqis would warmly greet US troops that it proposed smuggling hundreds of small American flags into Iraq ahead of the invasion to give Iraqis something to wave at the soldiers.
The CIA was then planning to capture the event on film and beam it throughout the Arab world, The New York Times reported last week, citing unnamed intelligence officials.
Still, Rumsfeld insisted that "the war plan and the postwar plan were both good ones."
He said claims that the Pentagon had prematurely "retired" former Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki after he told Congress that the occupation of Iraq would require hundreds of thousand of US soldiers, were "a flat lie."
Without mentioning Kerry by name, he took strong exception to the Democrat's charges the Pentagon had "outsourced" to tribal Afghan leaders the job of capturing Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden during a December 2001 operation in the Afghan region of Tora Bora.
"For anyone to be running around flyspecking what took place in Afghanistan ... is beyond comprehension," the defense secretary snapped.
Rumsfeld also made light of the controversy over missing Iraqi explosives seized upon by the Democratic campaign.
"Do you remember when the museum - everyone said the museum was looted?" he said when asked to comment on the disappearance of 380 tonnes of conventional high explosives from Al-Qaqaa military base south of Baghdad.
The secretary was referring to reports about massive looting at the Iraqi national museum after the fall of Baghdad that later proved to be exaggerated because many of the artifacts had been hidden by curators.
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