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'US won't leave Iraq while Saddam supporters remain active'
Top Pentagon adviser Richard Perle said here Tuesday that US troops could not leave Iraq while a band of what he said were some 30,000 armed supporters of Saddam Hussein's fallen regime remained active. He added that Washington has a generally positive view of President Vladimir Putin â who opposed the Iraq war â but would in the future judge the Russian leader on his actions rather than his public pronouncements. "There were of course many reasons for starting the war in Iraq," Perle told reporters when asked about US and British troops' failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq more than three months after the campaign began. "We are clearly starting to see that up to 300,000 people were killed and buried" by Saddam's regime, he said. Perle added that "we are absolutely certain" that weapons of mass destruction are hidden in Iraq â Washington's motive for launching the offensive against Baghdad â but that it may take dozens of years to find them. "We don't know where to look for them and we never did know where to look for them," he admitted. Asked by a reporter when he thought the evidence of those weapons may be found, Perle joked: "I hope this will take less than 200 years."Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2003-07-24 |
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