26 September 2003
Rumsfeld Says Iraqis Must Fashion Solutions to Their Future
Says U.S. role is to help Iraqis build their own country
By Jacquelyn S. Porth
Washington File Staff Security Affairs Writer
Washington -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says the sooner Iraqis are equipped to defend themselves, the faster foreign forces can depart Iraq and the Iraqis can embrace the task of "fashioning Iraqi solutions to their future."
Rumsfeld told an audience at the Eisenhower National Security Conference September 25 that a "foreign presence in any country, is in my view, unnatural. ... Despite good intentions there can be unintended adverse side effects. When foreigners come in with their international solutions to local problems, it can create a dependency."
Although there are now 32 nations working together to put the Iraqi people on a path toward democracy and self-governance, the important thing is to enlist the Iraqis early in the process of governance, Rumsfeld said. "It is important because it is their country," he emphasized.
"We are not in Iraq to engage in nation building," Rumsfeld said. "Our mission is to help the Iraqis so they can build their own country" and that is something they must do for themselves, since "it cannot be handed to a people," he added.
Earlier in the day, during an interview with Sinclair Broadcasting, the secretary outlined the scope of security forces currently operating in Iraq. "The Iraqi Security Forces are growing at a very rapid rate: in four months they've gone from zero to 70,000," he said. Coalition forces total around 20,000, while U.S. forces are holding at around 130,000, according to Rumsfeld.
In another September 25 interview -- with Cox Broadcasting -- Rumsfeld was asked why money from U.S. taxpayers should be used for a prison in Iraq when money is needed for prisons in the United States. He said 100,000 prisoners were let loose in Iraq and "we've got to scoop as many of those people up as possible and put them back in prison before they kill people."
When asked whether the failure to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq thus far suggests that some weapons may have fallen into terrorist hands, Rumsfeld said "we'll know what the Iraqi Survey Group comes up with when they make their report (in October)."
In a third interview September 25 with a Belo Broadcasting reporter, the secretary addressed the subject of the quality of intelligence on Iraqi WMD. "We believed it then, we believe it now and we believe that at some point as we go forward ...we'll find that it was generally accurate," he replied.
On the subject of international cooperation regarding Iraq, Rumsfeld said, "We're getting good cooperation" from Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, but characterized the response by Syria and Iran as "not helpful."
"Syria has been a problem; the flow of people down through the Syrian border into Iraq has been a problem. We've arrested something in excess of 200 foreign fighters who've come in and an overwhelming majority of them are Syrian," according to the secretary.
"The situation in Iran is different, in a sense," Rumsfeld said, "but one of the biggest problems is [that] the Ansar al-Islam terrorist group that was in Iran has moved back into Iraq and that is notably unhelpful, so we're not getting the kind of cooperation from either of those countries that is notable at the moment."
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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