Posted by NEWS on 17/10/2004, 15:43:22 NEW YORK (AP) - Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Monday he does not expect a civil war to erupt in Iraq and pointed to the recent takeover of the former insurgent stronghold of Samarra as an example of progress in stabilising the country before elections in January. "I don't think it's going to happen,'' Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations when asked about the threat of civil war. "But what has to be done in that country is what basically was done in Samarra over the last 48 hours.'' Rumsfeld credited a process of first trying diplomacy, then threatening force and finally using it against the insurgents. "That's what happened in Samarra,'' he said, referring to the city that coalition and Iraqi forces had chosen as the first of at least three strongholds of resistance to be attacked in a pre-election campaign. Fallujah and the Sadr City section of Baghdad also are believed to be on the target list. Suspected rebel enclaves in both have come under allied air attack in recent days. Rumsfeld said insurgents were trying to "snuff out'' allied success and create chaos in Iraq. He said that from the insurgents' standpoint, the question is "what if Iraq makes it?'' "Think of where the extremists are ... their goal is to flip the governments in that part of the world and re-establish a caliphate, a handful of terrorists, to determine how everybody lives,'' Rumsfeld said. He said "behavior patterns'' among Iraqi factions vary so that no single area represents an overall threat of chaos. "What one has to do is do everything humanly possible to see that the people in that country, all elements in that country, come to develop the conviction that they have a stake in the future of that country,'' he said. "My guess is that what you'll see in that country is the government of Iraq systematically deciding that they are not going to accept safe havens of foreign terrorists and former regime elements running around threatening and killing people.'' U.S. troops patrolled Samarra on Monday as Iraqi commanders called the operation there an encouraging first step in a push to wrest key areas of Iraq from insurgents before elections. Rumsfeld said Iraqi forces involved at Samarra had performed well, in contrast to other instances in which they failed to do so. Asked to describe the connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, the Pentagon chief declined to answer the question but then said: "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.'' He said he had seen intelligence on that "migrate in amazing ways'' in the past year, adding that there were "many differences of opinion in the intelligence community.'' He did not elaborate on that but said relationships among terrorists "evolve and change over time.'' When asked what he thought was the primary reason for invading Iraq, he said it was important to remove Saddam's regime, but he acknowledged the intelligence ahead of the invasion was faulty. "It turns out that we have not found weapons of mass destruction,'' he said. "Why the intelligence proved wrong, I'm not in a position to say, but the world is a lot better off with Saddam Hussein in jail.'' Rumsfeld said President George W. Bush had taken the position that "it was unwise for the civilised world to allow Iraq to continue rejecting'' U.N. resolutions calling for a "vicious regime'' that had used weapons of mass destruction on its own people to give them up. "It was important to set that right by removing that regime before they could gather weapons of mass destruction for themselves or transfer them to terrorists,'' he said. "That was his view ... and that's what the United Nations voted on.'' Rumsfeld said "everyone believed'' Saddam had the weapons. "Even the people at the U.N. who voted the other way acknowledged the fact that he had filed a fraudulent declaration,'' he said. A day earlier, Rumsfeld told a television interviewer that he believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and the truth may unfold over months or years. "I'm surprised we have not found them yet,'' Rumsfeld said in the Fox News interview. "He has either hidden them so well or moved them somewhere else or decided to destroy them ... in event of a conflict but kept the capability of developing them rapidly.'' In response to other questions, Rumsfeld said that Iran was engaged in "a lot of meddling'' in Iraq and that Syria has been "notably unhelpful'' by refusing to release frozen Iraqi assets and allowing foreign terrorist movements across its border with Iraq. He said talks were in progress with Syria "but it's too early to say there's been any progress at all.'' Rumsfeld drew one brief burst of applause, when he praised Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf for defying Islamic extremists "who want to kill him'' and closing down the nuclear black market run by renegade scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. "Every day he gets up, he's walking a tightrope,'' Rumsfeld said of Musharraf. "He is a courageous person and a skillful person, and the world is very lucky he's there, doing what he's doing.''
Rumsfeld warns about return of Khilafah
US : No hard evidence linking Saddam to Sept. 11
Source: TheStar
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