I was a Scapegoat for Bush, Bremer Claims
"Paul Bremer, the former head of the coalition provisional authority, claimed his request for more troops was rejected by the Pentagon and the White House.
Mr Bremer, the man most commonly associated with implementing postwar policies that led to the rise of the insurgency, has claimed that senior US military officials including the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, tried to make him a scapegoat for their failings.
In a memoir published this week, Mr Bremer says that from the time he took the job in May 2003, shortly after the fall of Baghdad, he had misgivings about coalition troop levels and raised the issue a number of times with administration officials, including George Bush.
... In the memoir, titled My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope, Mr Bremer says he sent Mr Rumsfeld a copy of a report by a respected thinktank that estimated 500,000 troops would be needed to stabilise Iraq, but the defence secretary did not respond. Mr Rumsfeld also failed to respond to his recommendation in May 2004 to add 30,000 troops to the 160,000 in Iraq at the time.
Mr Bremer says he became so concerned about the issue of troop levels that he raised it with the president on a number of occasions, including at a lunch in June 2003 and in a video link with a national security council meeting chaired by Mr Bush. "I'm concerned we may be drawing down our forces here too soon," he says he told the president. "It's simply not enough to say that army and marine divisions will be replaced by forces from other countries.""
- posted by geoff @ #