|
  |
|
 |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rumsfeld: Military ready to go if Bush gives order
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. military is ready to launch military action against Iraq if President Bush issues the order, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday. "We are at a point where, if the president makes that decision, the Department of Defense is prepared and has the capabilities and strategy to do that," Rumsfeld said in an interview on PBS's "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." However, the U.S. defense chief said the recent buildup of U.S. forces in the Middle East does not mean that war is now inevitable. He said war could still be avoided if Iraq were to comply with U.N. demands to disarm -- or if Iraqi President Saddam Hussein either decided to leave voluntarily or was deposed by his own people. "Everyone's first choice would be not to have to have a conflict," he said. However, Rumsfeld indicated that U.S. forces would likely not be left in the region indefinitely. "There has to be some end to these things. Either you use them, or you bring them back," he said. Rumsfeld conceded that chances of a regime change in Iraq without military action are "remote." But he said only the threat of a U.S. strike makes it even a possibility. "It would only happen because the people in Iraq -- he, or the people around him who decide they would prefer he not be there -- were persuaded that it was inevitable that he was going to go, either voluntarily or involuntarily," Rumsfeld said. The defense secretary also said U.S. officials expect to get a final decision within "a day or two" on whether Turkey will allow a major deployment of U.S. troops on its soil. But he said that if the Turkish government decides not to allow the troops to be based in Turkey, "We'll do it another way." Rumsfeld said the mission of any military strike would be to invade Iraq, change the regime and disarm the country of its weapons of mass destruction. The new Iraq would be a unified country that does not threaten its neighbors and allows religious and ethnic minorities a voice in their government, he said. The new government "would be an Iraq that would be for the Iraqi people. It wouldn't be a regime determined from the outside of Iraq," Rumsfeld said, adding that claims that U.S. military action is motivated by a desire to seize Iraq's oil are "nonsense." "The oil is the oil of the Iraqi people," he said. Rumsfeld said U.S. military planners are preparing for a "full range" of possibilities when it comes to military action, including the possibility that Iraq could use chemical or biological weapons against U.S. troops or its neighbors. "There are any number of things that can go wrong. Now, there are also a number of things that can go right. And what one has to do is to look at them all with a cold eye and be very clear that you've simply got to be prepared to deal with all of them," he said. Rumsfeld said he expects that if war begins "there would be Iraqi forces that would surrender rather rapidly. Their morale is not high. They also have lived under Saddam Hussein and know what kind of person he is." However, he said U.S. military planners are not depending on such a collapse in drafting their strategy. Rumsfeld also said that if military action is ordered, he expects the number of nations participating in the U.S.-led "coalition of the willing" to be higher than the number that participated during the 1991 Gulf War -- despite opposition from France and Germany and antiwar protests around the world. "The charge 'unilateral' just isn't right," he said, noting that most European countries support the U.S. policy. "There's a split between most of the European countries ... and France and Germany," he said.
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
