June 6th 2004
SINGAPORE: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday the United States must win the test of wills in Iraq, warning that the alternative was civil war, a territorial breakup or the return of a “junior version” of Saddam Hussein.
Speaking at the Asia Security Conference in Singapore, Rumsfeld made a spirited defense of the US-led occupation after a participant recalled the Khmer Rouge genocide that followed the withdrawal of US forces from Cambodia in the 1970s.
“We are engaged in a test of wills,” Rumsfeld said.
“There is no way the coalition forces can be defeated on the battlefield. They simply cannot. The only way an outcome such as you have characterised could occur is if we have failed in the test of wills.”
Rumsfeld said the alternatives to winning in Iraq were clear. “You could have anarchy, you could have civil war, you could have ethnic cleansing, you could have the country broken up into pieces, you could have another Saddam Hussein, junior version, arrive on the scene and reimpose a vicious dictatorship, and start filling up mass graves again,” he said.
“So there is no alternative but pursuing this effort.”
However he said remaining steadfast and determined was “enormously difficult in a world with 24 hour a day news, seven days a week that focuses on the difficulties, the problems, the ugliness and ignores the progress.” “When I go there (to Iraq), I feel like it’s a sanity check,” he said.
“The people you talk to have confidence, they are pleased with the progress they see on the ground, they recognise it is difficult and tough.”
Rumsfeld cited polling data that showed 80 per cent of Iraqis were grateful Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was gone. He said 90 per cent of Kurds, 80 per cent of the Shia and 50 per cent of the Sunnis were relieved Saddam was gone.
He also defended the performance of the Iraqi security forces, which collapsed in many areas during uprisings in April in the Sunni triangle and in the Shiite areas of Baghdad and the south. Rumsfeld said it was “not unreasonable” that police who were unevenly trained and armed were unwilling to fight when faced with insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles.
