Powell blamed for occupation mess

[msgadget]

My apologies if this is a duplicate. I read that conservatives want Rumsfeld out but, evidently, Powell is being blamed for the mess the occupation has become.


http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/11/30/80903.shtml


>Perle: Rumsfeld Opposed, Powell Wanted Occupation

Secretary Colin Powell, the State Department and the CIA – not Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld – are responsible for the chaos that has grown out of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, says Richard Perle, the former chairman of Pentagon's Defense Policy Review Board.


Appearing on Fox News' "O’Reilly Factor" Monday night, Perle said the U.S. made a most serious mistake after Iraq was liberated and the "keys" were not handed over immediately to Iraqis to run their own country.<

....

>When O’Reilly cited Colin Powell as a dissenting voice who warned the president that if "you break it , you’ll own it," Perle said, "the irony is that it was Secretary Powell and some others who wanted the extended occupation. They are the ones who did not want to turn things over to the Iraqis, who feared and distrusted the Iraqis and blocked all efforts to do precisely that."

Perle then revealed that even before the war Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense had argued that we should train thousands of Iraqis "to go in with us so that we wouldn’t be the aggressor, we wouldn’t be the occupying power, and those proposals were blocked largely by the State Department and the CIA. Rumsfeld was never able to get approval for the political strategy that might well have saved us from much of the subsequent trouble." <