Former US security advisor rebukes administration over Iraq invasion
Posted: Sunday December 26,2004 - 12:54:08 pm
WASHINGTON, Dec 26 (AFP) - Former US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski strongly criticised the American-led invasion of Iraq and said the US administration would have to scale down its ambitions for Iraq's future.
AFP/File Photo
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, expressed support for the invasion on the same CNN programme, but said the US administration had misjudged the difficulty of rebuilding Iraq and guiding it to democracy.
Brzezinski, the national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter in the 1980s, made a scathing assessment of the US-led invasion in March 2003 and ensuing occupation after ousting Saddam Hussein as Iraqi leader.
"I personally think it was not worth it, in the sense that we have paid a high price in blood. And it's increasing. You cannot underestimate the suffering that this has already produced to tens of thousands of American families."
He said tens of thousands of Iraqis have died and added: "We're spending billions of dollars, and we have isolated ourselves internationally.
"Now, that is simply not worth the price of removing Saddam, because we were containing him. But we are where we are. And the problem today is, in my judgment, how to avoid failure."
Brzezinski said the United States "will confront a continuing problem and maybe a deepening crisis if there remains this massive disproportion between objectives which are unrealistic and means which are very limited.
"If we are very serious about creating an Iraqi democracy, let's put in 500,000 troops and let's spend 100 billion, 200 billion (dollars). We're not going to do it and therefore, we have to scale down our expectations."
Kissinger remains a strong supporter of the Bush administration line. "I believe that they made fundamentally the right decision in entering the war. But they underestimated the complexity of rebuilding a democratic society in Iraq under military occupation," he said.
Kissinger said the whole administration leadership, and not just embattled Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had to look again at the political decisions made.
The two also disagreed over the future makeup of Iraq's government.
Brzezinski said there was now a growing probability that a "Shiite theocratic government, which is not going to be a genuine democracy" would win Iraq's elections to be held on January 30.
Kissinger said the United States should not accept a Shiite theocracy for all of Iraq. "And if it reaches this point, then we really have no interest in keeping Iraq united.
"Then we might just as well let each of these competing ethnic groups create their own self-government, rather than imposing a theocracy on, or cooperate with creating a theocracy for all of Iraq." |
