WASHINGTON,
June 23 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - As two top U.S.
senators Sunday, June 22, warned that American military presence will
likely have to remain for an "extended period of time", U.S.
Central Command chief Tommy Franks urged deployment of more troops to
the country.
"I
don't think the administration has planned this very well, nor have
they come forward with a complete understanding of the kind of
investment that the United States is going to have to put into
Iraq," Senator Chuck Hagel told ABC's "This Week"
program.
"What
I think this administration needs to do is come to the American people
and lay it out, to some extent. And I know it's imperfect, everybody
does. But it is clearly in the interests of this country, and the
American people would support," the Nebraska Republican was
quoted by Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Senator
Richard Lugar said the United States was involved in "nation
building" in Iraq and that "this is an opportunity for a
democracy, for a vibrant economy, for a model that is different in the
world and in the Middle East."
"It's
important we all understand that, the President says that, it's a
five-year plan of stability for a country that is bankrupt, that is
dangerous," said the Republican from Indiana, who heads the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Senator
Joe Biden, a Democrat from Delaware, also urged Bush "to the
American people and tell them the facts."
"We're
talking about tens of thousands of troops for an extended period of
time. We knew that from the beginning," he said.
The
comments came the U.S. forces in Iraq face daily attacks, leaving more
than 50 of them dead, amid amounting calls from local inhabitants for
a quick end to occupation and the formation of a national
representative government at the helm.
Longer
Time
 |
|
"We
were misled. The question is, did the President do that on
purpose,” Dean
|
Meanwhile,
U.S. Central Command chief in Iraq Tommy Franks said he believed the
occupation of Iraq could require more than 200,000 troops, depending
on how events unfold.
"If
the fractious behavior subsides, and the Iraqis form all the city
councils that are necessary in the 27 highest population centers in
the 18 provinces, and things go very, very well, I think that the
force level can come down rather dramatically, rather quickly,"
Franks told The New Yorker magazine.
"The
other bookend is the opposite of that, and that level - which I do not
see being enhanced - would remain for a longer period of time,"
he said.
Franks
also said just after the invasion ended that he thought Iraq's deposed
leader Saddam Hussein could have been killed in the first strike
against him.
"People can trick this, and think about it in a lot of different
ways. But . . . I still haven't seen anything that convinces me that
Saddam Hussein's alive," he said.
The
remarks came as U.S. Defense Department is investigating whether a
recent strike on a three-vehicle convoy fleeing Iraq near the Syrian
border killed former top Iraqi officials, including Saddam and his
sons, The Washington Post reported Monday.
'Misleading'
On
his part, Senator Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate
Intelligence Committee, said that Congress's closed door review of the
U.S. intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction may
take "months".
Members
of the Senate Intelligence Committee and their staff members are
poring over "thousands and thousands of pages" of classified
documents delivered to the panel by the Central Intelligence Agency,
Rockefeller said, speaking on the Fox News television show on Sunday,
June 22.
The
task of reviewing the contents of those files will occupy the
committee "for the next, I would assume, couple of months,"
said Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia.
The
committee's chairman, Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, said
the senators face the daunting task of reviewing "voluminous
material from the ceiling to the floor."
Intelligence
committees in both the Senate and the House of Representatives
commenced hearings last week into the brewing controversy over whether
the administration of President George W. Bush hyped intelligence
regarding Iraq's alleged nuclear and biological weapons program.
More
than two months into the end of the invasion, no weapons of mass
destruction have been found so far in Iraq.
Damaging
In Elections
 |
|
“I
still haven't seen anything that convinces me that Saddam
Hussein's alive," Franks
|
With
the absence of hard evidence for the presence of Iraq's banned
programmed, accusations that the Bush administration made the case on
false pretexts could prove damaging to Republicans in the 2004
election campaign.
Democratic
presidential hopeful Howard Dean accused Bush of misleading the
country about Iraq's possession of unconventional weapons.
"We
were misled. The question is, did the president do that on purpose or
was he misled by his own intelligence people ... Or did he in fact
know what the truth was and tell us something different," former
Vermont governor Howard Dean told NBC's "Meet the Press"
program.
"We
essentially went to war ... based on facts that turned out not to be
accurate. I think that's pretty serious, and I think the American
people are entitled to know why that was," he said.
"This
president told us that we were going into Iraq because they might have
atomic weapons and that turned out not to be so," he said.
"The
secretary of defense told us that he knew where there were weapons of
mass destruction around Tikrit and around Baghdad. We've been in
control of Iraq for 50 days and we haven't been able to find any such
thing."
CIA
director George Tenet may appear this week before the Senate committee
investigating whether the White House distorted intelligence
information about Iraq's alleged weapons programs, Time magazine
reported Sunday.
The
magazine quoted White House chief of staff Andy Card as defending the
administration's use of intelligence, while admitting that some of the
information turned out to be wrong.
"It
would be great if I, or the president, or the vice president could be
all-knowing. But we're not," Card said.
Al-Qaeda
Links
The
Bush administration also braces for other accusations that it brushed
aside important caveats in intelligence reports linking Iraq to the
al-Qaeda network, The Washington Post said Sunday,
citing intelligence and congressional sources.
Bush
appeared before the U.S. public in a nationally broadcast address in
October, declaring that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was a threat to
the United States, in part because of ties he asserted Baghdad
maintained ties to al-Qaeda.
But
sources with access to classified materials told The Post that
"a still-classified national intelligence report circulating
within the Bush administration at the time ... portrayed a far less
clear picture about the link between Iraq and al-Qaeda than the one
presented by the president."
The
classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, which
represented the consensus of the U.S. intelligence agencies, contained
cautionary language and warnings about the reliability of information
from Iraqi defectors and al-Qaeda captives.
"There
has always been an internal argument within the intelligence community
about the connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. The NIE had
alternative views," one senior intelligence official told the
paper on condition of anonymity.
The
Post also raised doubts about Bush's assertion in his
State of the Union address in January - important address that aimed
to rally public support for the invasion - that Iraq had sought to buy
uranium in Africa to relaunch a nuclear weapons program.
Ten
months earlier, the Central Intelligence Agency sent a former diplomat
to Niger to investigate the claim, the paper said. That country's
officials said documents alleging the sale were forged, it added.
Details
of the probe were not shared with the White House, the paper said.
