WASHINGTON, 15 March 2004 — As the first anniversary of the Iraq invasion looms, US leaders insisted yesterday that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction does not lessen the case for war, but acknowledged major questions about the June 30 handover of sovereignty.
“I do believe it was the right thing to do. I’m glad it’s done,” said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of administration hawks behind the March 20 invasion.
Pressed about the lack of chemical and biological weapons used to justify the war, Secretary of State Colin Powell said: “I don’t think this takes away from the merit of the case.”
“I don’t think this takes away from the rightness of this, to remove this dictator, make sure that there would be no weapons of mass destruction in the future,” he said.
With Iraq and foreign policy likely to become a focus of the campaign for the Nov. 2 presidential election, Rumsfeld, Powell and President George W. Bush’s national security advisor Condoleezza Rice staged a public opinion offensive on the main Sunday political shows.
Rice told NBC that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein headed “the most dangerous regime in the world’s most dangerous region.”
And Powell told Fox News channel, “I think the major achievement is that this dictator and his awf?ul regime are gone.
“No more mass graves are? being filled. We don’t have to debate about weapons of mass destruction any longer, because we know there will be none in the future.”
Powell and Rumsfeld said the United States still aims to hand over power to a transitional Iraqi government on June 30, but with security in the country still not under control, they acknowledged many questions about the makeup of the new Iraqi government and the US role after.
The secretary of state said the United States was seeking to widen the support of the Iraqi Governing Council.
“We’re looking at different models. Should it be expanded? Should there be another arrangement put in place? And Ambassador Paul Bremer is hard at work on this with the Iraqis themselves.”
Rumsfeld said he had no preference for the Iraq interim administration.
“My answer is we’re going to get an Iraqi solution to this and that’s better than any other solution,” he told CBS television.
Rumsfeld said there had to be progress toward self-government, greater security and restoring essential services.
He said there were now more than 200,000 Iraqis trained to provide security and highlighted that more Iraqi forces were being killed than members of the US-led military coalition in Iraq.
“Now the argument that it’s too fast or too soon I guess we’ll only know in retrospect because it’s a difficult thing to judge.”
But he said there would be faster progress if “there is an Iraqi face on the government.”
Powell emphasized on ABC that the United States would not be “abandoning Iraq on the first of July” and that 100,000 US troops would remain along with a “very large” US Embassy.
He admitted however that “there is a long way to go, but we are on our way to a better future for the Iraqi people, and that’s a major accomplishment.”
The secretary added: “I think if we just stay the course, if we show determination, if we help the Iraqi people, we’ll put in place a stable democracy in Iraq, a democratic nation in Iraq, and that will be an example to the rest of the region, an example to the world.”
