UK's General Sir Mike Jackson angriber USA vedr. Irak

Highlights:

"Sir Mike, who took command of the British Army one month before US-led forces invaded Iraq, said Mr Rumsfeld was "one of those most responsible for the current situation in Iraq".


Crucially, the general writes, he refused to deploy enough troops to maintain law and order after the collapse of Saddam's regime, and discarded detailed plans for the post-conflict administration of Iraq that had been drawn up by the US State Department.
In the book, Sir Mike says he believes the entire US approach to tackling global terrorism is "inadequate" because it relies too heavily on military power at the expense of nation-building and diplomacy."

"Sir Mike says the failure of the US-led coalition to suppress the Iraqi insurgency four years after Saddam's overthrow was down to the Pentagon's refusal to deploy enough troops. A combined force of 400,000 would be needed to control a country the size of Iraq, but even with the extra troops recently deployed for the US military's "surge" the coalition has struggled to reach half that figure.

Sir Mike is particularly critical of President Bush's decision to hand control of the post-invasion running of Iraq to the Pentagon, when all the post-war planning had been done by the State Department.

"All the planning carried out by the State Department went to waste," he writes. For Mr Rumsfeld and his neo-conservative supporters "it was an ideological article of faith that the coalition forces would be accepted as a liberating army.

"Once you had decapitated Saddam Hussein's regime, a model democratic society would inevitably emerge."

Læs resten:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=UUI4XW1GEXIN3QFIQMFSFF4AVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/2007/09/01/wirq101.xml

Sir Mike Jackson's kritik af den amerikanske administrations håndtering af Irak, bakkes op af flere. Generalmajor Patrick Cordingley, som ledte de såkaldte Desert Rats under Golfkrigen i 1991, kalder således Sir Mike Jackson's analyse for "absolutely spot on".

Sir Malcolm Rifkind siger endvidere: "I think one of the most fundamental criticisms is not just that Rumsfeld was incompetent - which he was - but it was actually his boss, George Bush, who actually made the extraordinary decision to put the Pentagon and Rumsfeld in control of political nation-building after the actual war ended."´

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-6890347,00.html