US Deputy Defense Secretary Mr Paul Wolfowitz said the United States was unprepared for the collapse of law and order in post war Iraq and the subsequent difficulties there, the Los Angeles Timessaid today.
Mr Wolfowitz, a leading architect of the war in Iraq, told the paper that no amount of advance planning could have foreseen the collapse in law and order after the US and British military victory.
"The so-called forces of law and order (in Baghdad) just kind of collapsed. There is not a single plan that would have dealt with that," Mr Wolfowitz was quoted as telling the newspaper.
"This is a country that was ruled by a gang of terrorist criminals and they're still around. They're threatening Iraqis and killing Americans," he said.
Mr Wolfowitz was interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by the LA Times into the apparent failure to plan sufficiently for postwar Iraq.
Mr Wolfowitz, who was in Baghdad today, and other senior US officials interviewed, said the speed of the US military victory had created problems in itself, leaving large areas of Iraq under only nominal control by US and British forces.
But Mr Wolfowitz said: "I would not for a moment go back and say 'Gee we should have gone slower so we could have had more forces built up behind us to control areas that we went past."
The Los Angeles Timesinvestigation said serious multi-agency discussions on post-war Iraq started only in February and they had been plagued by false assumptions and infighting among various government departments and agencies.
Mr Jay Garner, the retired army general who was appointed the first civilian administrator of Iraq, said there was little co-ordination between the various departments.
"Each one of them did their own planning and they did it ... with the perspective of their agency. What needed to happen was the horizontal integration of these plans," Garner was quoted as telling the LA Times.
Senior officials and experts noted that many of the doomsday predictions over the war had proved wrong, including forecasts for a long and bloody battle for Baghdad, instability across the Arab world, mass oil field fires, a refugee crisis, famine, and the threat of Turkey intervening.