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Rumsfeld: Troop level in Iraq up to CentComU.S. deaths in postwar Iraq equal to those in conflict
LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE, Texas (CNN) -- Although there is no immediate plan to increase U.S. troop strength in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Monday that if the head of U.S. Central Command requested more forces, he would get them. Lawmakers and other officials have begun questioning whether the current 140,000 U.S. troops are enough after last week's bombing at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. Rumsfeld acknowledged "there are some recommending that more U.S. forces go in" and added that the troop level needs to be reviewed "fairly continuously." "If we're going to make an error, we ought to have too many, rather than too few," Rumsfeld told military personnel at the base. But he stressed that Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command , has said the current number of U.S. troops in Iraq is "appropriate." "If we got the recommendation from the combatant commander that he thinks he needs more forces, he'll have them." Another 24,000 coalition troops are contributing to the operation, while about 50,000 Iraqis are involved in security efforts, ranging from police work to border patrol. Rumsfeld also said the United States has launched a "full-court" press to try to get more Iraqis trained and participating in the security efforts of their country. "If you think about," the defense secretary said, "if you had a choice between foreign presence for security and Iraqi presence for security with an Iraqi face on it, clearly the latter is preferable." The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority said Monday it was looking outside Iraq to train Iraqi police officers and it may send as many as 16,000 Iraqi police officers per year to train in Hungary in a few months. The authority said training facilities in Iraq lack the capacity to get the Iraqi police force up to its goal of 65,000 officers. About 37,000 officers have been trained. Hungary has not been confirmed as the location of the eight-week training course, but the coalition declined to name any other sites under consideration. The U.S. military on Monday suffered its 138th death in Iraq, making the number of fatalities since the end of major combat equal to those during the height of the Iraqi war, according to U.S. military figures. The latest death was that of a U.S. soldier Monday from a "nonhostile" gunshot wound, U.S. Central Command said. The soldier -- whose name was withheld pending notification of relatives -- was with the 130th Engineer Brigade, according to a spokesman. No other information was available. Since President Bush declared the end of major combat on May 1, 61 of the 138 U.S. service members killed have died in hostile action. Between the start of the war on March 20 and May 1, 116 died in combat. Red Cross scales backIn the wake of recent violence, the International Committee of the Red Cross decided to reduce the number of non-Iraqi staffers working in Baghdad, a group spokesman said Monday, fearing more attacks such as the bombing at U.N. headquarters in the capital. "Due to the recent events ... the U.N. compound and Jordanian embassy bombing and daily attacks on the Iraqi people -- we have decided to scale back operations," said Florian Westphal, a Red Cross press officer in Geneva, Switzerland. "It is a regrettable decision to have to take and once things stabilize in Iraq we may scale up activities there again." (Full story) The attack killed at least 20 people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. envoy to Iraq. An August 7 bomb attack at the Jordanian Embassy killed 10 people. Investigators have completed the search and recovery mission at U.N. headquarters, and they are poring over forensic evidence gathered from the site, coalition officials said Monday. "It's not possible right now to give you an accurate figure about how many people are dead and how many people are still missing," said U.N. security officer Nicholas Rademeyer, adding that the number of wounded also was elusive since many people had been transferred out of Iraq for treatment. Other developments• U.S. forces are continuing to conduct raids and searches for the remnants of Saddam Hussein's former regime and so-called foreign fighters who have reportedly swarmed into Iraq to battle Americans. The military said Monday it had rounded up seven more people it suspects of helping conduct attacks on U.S. forces. • Crowds gathered Monday in the holy city of Najaf for the funerals of three people killed in Sunday's bombing outside the house of one of Iraq's top Shiite Muslim clerics, Ayatollah Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim. (Full story) • National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on Monday likened the rocky road faced by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq to difficulties experienced by Allied forces in Germany after World War II and vowed: "the terrorists will lose." In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in El Paso, Texas, Rice noted that 117 days have elapsed since Bush declared major combat operations had ended. "That is simply not very long," she said. • The body of Vieira de Mello, the U.N. envoy killed in last week's Baghdad blast, arrived in Geneva for burial this week. The body was flown in an official aircraft from Brazil, the diplomat's native land, for a 24-hour wake in Rio de Janeiro. His remains were flown Friday to Brazil from Baghdad. (Full story) CNN Correspondents Rym Brahimi, Barbara Starr and Ben Wedeman and Producers Marga Ortigas and Ingrid Formanek contributed to this report.
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