washingtonbureau.typepad.com
Retired U.S. Army Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was relieved as the top U.S. commander in Iraq by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal became public in 2004, is blasting back in a new memoir, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story.
In an excerpt published in the latest edition of Time, Sanchez recounts what he contends was an attempt by Rumsfeld to involve him in rewriting the history of the invasion of Iraq by shifting to the ground commanders the blame for the failure to deploy a sufficient number of occupation troops.
Sanchez writes that Rumsfeld insisted that he was never told about an order issued by former Gen. Tommy Franks, then head of CENTCOM, for a drawdown of U.S. troops that countermanded the original plan for a 12-18 month occupation. The order directed that all but 30,000 U.S. troops should be out of Iraq by September 2003, only five months after the fall of Baghdad. Sanchez rejects Rumsfeld's version of what happened, which is indeed hard to believe given Rumsfeld's notorious micro-managing of the invasion.
"That decision set up the United States for a failed first year in Iraq. There is no question about it," writes Sanchez. "And I was supposed to believe that neither the secretary of defense or anybody above him knew anything about it? Impossible! Everybody on the NSC knew about it, including Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet and Colin Powell. Vice President Cheney knew about it. And President Bush knew about it."
"In my mind," he writes, "this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty."
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