Rumsfeld saw memo seeking troops

WASHINGTON – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday that he seriously considered a 2004 memo from L. Paul Bremer, then the senior U.S. official in Iraq, calling for tens of thousands more U.S. troops to quell the insurgency. But he said military commanders and service chiefs disagreed with Bremer.

Bremer’s memo, dated May 18, 2004, urged Rumsfeld to dispatch up to two additional divisions – or about 30,000 troops – to Iraq, to meet a myriad of demands ranging from fighting insurgents to border control. The request, disclosed in Bremer’s new book on his tenure in Iraq, reflected what he said was his fear that the United States was becoming “the worst of all things – an ineffective occupier.”

Rumsfeld, speaking at a Pentagon news briefing, recalled that he showed the Bremer memo to then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, saying, “This is a reasonable proposal from a reasonable person; let’s look at it.”

But after evaluating the proposal, the Joint Chiefs of Staff concurred with U.S. commanders responsible for Iraq that troop levels were adequate, said Gen. Peter Pace, who succeeded Myers as chairman of the Joint Chiefs and appeared with Rumsfeld at Thursday’s briefing.

“We did a very thorough analysis of that recommendation and when we got done, all the chiefs agreed with the commanders in the field that the numbers of troops in the field then, as now, was appropriate to what we were fighting,” Pace said.

Rumsfeld said he then showed the response from the Joint Chiefs to President Bush. “The president, as he has consistently, said that he preferred to go with the judgments of the military commanders on the ground,” Rumsfeld said.

Bremer says that Rumsfeld never responded to his recommendation. Rumsfeld said he did reply.

“I thanked him for his suggestion and said we would look into it, and we did,” Rumsfeld said. He said Bremer had departed his post before the Joint Chiefs completed its response, and so Bremer did not receive that. “By the time he left he was … no longer in a position where it would be appropriate to have given him the outcome, and he never asked that I recall,” Rumsfeld said. “So it’s no big deal.”