From the NewsMax.com Staff

For the story behind the story...

Bremer: We Didn't Have Enough Troops

Reprint Information

Book on Katie Couric Makes Waves White House: We're Not Subject to FOIA FBI Seeks 2 Mysterious Men on Ferry Publisher: Conservatives Do Read As Much As Liberals Romney Shrugs Off Mormon History Film

In May of 2003, just 11 days after he had declared an end to major combat in Iraq, President Bush sent Ambassador Paul Bremer to Baghdad to serve as the top American there.

For more than a year afterward, Bremer worked to stabilize the country and to help Iraqis build a new country on the ruins of the Saddam Hussein regime.

Story Continues Below

  "It was a much tougher job than I think I expected it to be," he told NBC's Brian Williams in an exclusive interview, citing his belief that too few troops had been sent to do the job of pacifying the country and defeating the insurgency.

After reading a report from a think tank that concluded that the job would require three times the number of U.S. troops than we had in Iraq, Bremer tried to get the attention of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

When Williams asked him how Rumsfeld reacted to his statement that he would need half a million troops to do the job, Bremer told him he "sent a summary of it around to Rumsfeld and just said, 'I thought you should take a look at this.' I never had any reaction from him."

Bremer recalled that he then discussed his concerns with the president. Bush, he said, told him he would try to get more troops from other countries, but said nothing about increasing the number of American forces.

In the face of his worries about the lack of sufficient U.S. forces, Bremer had new concerns about the Pentagon’s determination to send U.S. troops home by the spring of 2004 - the same force he argued we didn’t have enough of at the beginning of the war.

As a result of his concerns he turned to Vice President Dick Cheney.

"I said to the vice president, "You know I’m not sure ‘Well, I have similar concerns.' He thought there was something to be said for the argument that we didn’t have a strategy for victory at that time."

Asked why no one saw the insurgency coming, Bremer said, "You know I’ve thought about that as I looked back a lot, because we really didn’t see the insurgency coming. It’s another question about how good our pre-war intelligence was. That the intelligence assets were largely focused on the main question: Does he have weapons of mass destruction. It happens we seem to have got that wrong. But I suspect there was very little attention paid to what kind of an insurgency would come afterwards.

In his new book, "My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope,” Bremer writes about an Iraqi document that spelled out the Saddam Hussein regime's pre-invasion plans to mount an insurgency:

"… At my morning intelligence briefing, Bill [CIA Station Chief] and an astute Arabic-speaking Army captain named Julia Nesheiwat had shown me a water-spotted Mukhabarat document in Arabic - replete with stamps and signatures - and a verbatim English translation.

"It’s dated 23 January 2003, Mr. Ambassador,” Julia had explained. "One of our teams found it in a ransacked Iraqi intelligence office.”

"Both the MI analysts, and the station people consider it authentic, sir,” Bill had added, referring to Military Intelligence. "It’s their equivalent of Top Secret/Sensitive.”

The document was addressed, "To All Offices and Sections.” To cover "an emergency” (the Coalition invasion of Iraq), the Mukhabarat listed orders for a point-by-point strategy to be implemented after the probable collapse of the regime. Beginning with the order, "Burn this office.”

I read the translation. It did indeed call for a strategy of organized resistance, which included the classic pattern of forming cells and training combatants in insurgency. 'Operatives' were to engage in 'sabotage and looting.' Random sniper attacks and ambushes were to be organized."

Other disclosures in the interview with Williams included such revelations as: