The White House staunchly defended its Iraq policy on Tuesday as new questions emerged about US President George W. Bush's prewar decisions and postwar planning. An impending weapons report undercut the administration's main rationale for the war, and the former head of the US occupation said the US had too few troops in Iraq after the invasion.
Four weeks before the election, Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry pounced on an acknowledgment by former Iraq administrator Paul Bremer on Monday that the US had "paid a big price" for insufficient troop levels.
Bremer, who shot into the national headlines with his remarks, softened his comments during a speech on Tuesday in Michigan.
"We certainly had enough [troops] going into Iraq, because we won the war in a very short three weeks," he told an audience of more than 400 people at Michigan State University.
"The point that I have been making, and that has gotten a little bit distorted in the press recently, is that, as I look back now, I believe it would have been better to stop the looting that was found right after the war.
"One way to have stopped the looting would have been to have more troops on the ground. That's a retrospective wisdom of mine, looking backwards," he added. "I think there are enough troops there now for the job we are doing."
Kerry said there was a "long list of mistakes" that the Bush administration had made in Iraq.
"I'm glad that Paul Bremer has finally admitted at least two of them," Kerry said, referring to postwar troop levels and a failure to contain chaos.
A 1,000-page report by the chief US weapons inspector in Iraq, Charles Duefler, concludes that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had less capacity to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons when the invasion occurred last year than it did in 1998, when UN weapons inspectors left, the Washington Post reported on its Web site on Tuesday night.
But the report, which was to be released yesterday, also includes comments Saddam made to debriefers after his capture supporting the administration's assertions, the Post said, quoting an unidentified senior US official. It cited a claim by Saddam that his past possession of weapons of mass destruction "was one of the reasons he had survived so long."
A US official said he could not confirm the report on Tuesday night.
At a campaign stop in Tipton, Iowa, Kerry said the question for voters was whether Bush was "constitutionally incapable of acknowledging the truth" or was "just so stubborn."
In a rare day spent in Washington, Bush remained out of sight and silent, letting his surrogates answer Kerry's charges. His speechwriters polished an address that administration aides said would be a sweeping indictment of Kerry's policies on Iraq, the war on terrorism and the economy.
"It's a comprehensive look at two very different records, one of accomplishment, and one of being on the wrong side of history over and over again," Bush campaign communications director Nicolle Devenish said of the speech.
The address in the swing state of Pennsylvania was originally to focus on healthcare, but the White House reversed course and made it about Iraq, seeking to blunt a new report on the absence of weapons of mass destruction there before the war.
Bremer, in a speech last month at DePauw University in Indiana, said he had raised with the Bush administration the issue of there being too few troops and "should have been even more insistent" when his advice was rejected.
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