The head of the British Army during the invasion of Iraq Sir Mike Jackson has launched a scathing attack on the United States for the way it handled the post-war administration of the country.
Holding the then US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld responsible for the current situation in Iraq, the former chief of the general staff said Rumsfeld was 'intellectually bankrupt' and his claim that American forces 'don't do nation-building' was 'nonsensical', London's The Daily Telegraph reported on Saturday.
According to Sir Jackson, the failure of the US-led coalition to suppress the Iraqi insurgency four years after Saddam Hussain's overthrow was due to the Pentagon's refusal to deploy enough troops.
"Crucially, he (Rumsfeld) refused to deploy enough troops to maintain law and order after the collapse of Saddam Hussain's regime, and discarded detailed plans for the
post-conflict administration of Iraq that had been drawn up by the US State Department," the daily quoted the British general's remarks made in his forthcoming book Soldier.
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, according to him.
Criticising US President George W Bush's decision to hand over control of the post-invasion running of Iraq to the Pentagon, when all the post-war planning had been done by the State Department, he wrote, "All the planning carried out by the State Department went to waste."
Sir Jackson's remarks in his autobiography has revealed the deep-seated tension between the British command and the Pentagon during the build-up to and the aftermath of the Iraq campaign in 2003, according to the British daily.
In the book, he wrote that he believed 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'.
According to the general, he and other senior army officers were opposed to the Pentagon's decision to disband the Iraqi army after Saddam's overthrow. "It was very short-sighted... We should have kept the Iraqi security services in being and put them under the coalition command."
Sir Jackson has also claimed that he and other senior officers had doubts about the weapons of mass destruction dossier presented by the Blair government in late 2002. "We all knew that it was impossible for Iraq to threaten the UK mainland. Saddam's Scud missiles could barely have reached our bases on Cyprus, and certainly no more distant target."
But, he wrote that he satisfied himself on the legality of invading Iraq by careful study of the relevant UN Security Council resolutions and concluded the action was 'legitimate under international law without a second resolution'.
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