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Former U.S. Administrator in Iraq Says Too Many Resources Committed to Finding WMD
Former U.S. administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer said the focus on Iraq’s suspected WMD programs might have undercut U.S. preparedness to deal with the postwar insurgency, the Associated Press reported today (see GSN, Dec. 8, 2005). “The fact that there would be some resistance was anticipated. What really caught us by surprise was its intensity,” he said yesterday in New York while promoting his book, “My Year in Iraq.” “I suppose an argument would be that the intelligence resources were almost entirely devoted to WMD and not to this question of the insurgency,” he added. Bremer is his book claims that too many resources were spent looking for weapons of mass destruction. He said that in the middle of 2003 the Iraq Survey Group charged with seeking the weapons had a staff of 1,400. Recounting an exchange he had at the time with a CIA official in Baghdad, Bremer claims he said, “Look, it's pretty unlikely that our troops will be killed by WMD. But every day they're being blown up by Baathist insurgents or terrorists. Finding and eliminating these guys has to be our No. 1 priority.” However, the hunt for weapons of mass destruction continued for months before those resources were shifted to fight the growing insurgency, according to AP (Associated Press/Yahoo!News, Jan. 18).
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