Pentagon admits Iraq mistakes
From Jamie McIntyre, CNN Senior Pentagon Correspondent
Thursday, July 24, 2003 Posted: 2:13 AM EDT (0613 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) – Back from a four-day whirlwind tour of Iraq, the Pentagon's number two civilian, Paul Wolfowitz, has admitted that many of the Bush administration's pre-war assumptions were wrong.
While he insists that many things are now going right and the rebuilding of Iraq is progressing much better than many people think, he also concedes many beliefs the Pentagon had ahead of the war were mistaken.
"There's been a lot of talk that there was no plan. There was a plan" he said Wednesday in a briefing to reporters after returning from his inspection tour.
But, he added, "as any military officer can tell you, no plan survives first contact with reality,"
Among the things Wolfowitz says the U.S. guessed incorrectly was the assumption that some Iraqi Army units would switch sides; that the Iraqi Police would help maintain security; and that regime remnants would not resort to guerrilla tactics.
"I believe this will go down as the first guerrilla tactic in history in which contract killings, killings for hire, going out and soliciting young men for $500 to take a shot at an American, was the principal tactic employed," he said.
The miscalculations have resulted in a security problem that has forced the army to devise a complicated rotation plan to maintain roughly 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq until at least late next year....
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