WASHINGTON, Nov 2: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Sunday that “today was a bad day” for American troops in Iraq where a helicopter was shot down, killing at least 15 people.
Mr Rumsfeld, while talking to reporters after the attack, also pledged to increase the size of the newly-constituted Iraqi army from 100,000 to 200,000 by next year to replace its forces in that country.
“What it was is a bad day, a bad day, a tragic day for those young men and women. In a war, there are going to be days like that. And it is necessary that we recognize that,” said the US defence secretary while commenting on the helicopter attack in Fallujah.
“There are going to be days where large numbers of people, as yesterday, are killed. That’s what war is about. Is it deteriorating in general? No, it’s not,” he added.
He, however, acknowledged that the number of incidents had gone up in the recent weeks.
He said the US troops will now use new tactics to break up “the more sophisticated enemy in Iraq.”
“First of all, the coalition forces are out attacking these remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime, and they’re finding them, and they’re capturing them, and they’re killing them,” he said.
Mr Rumsfeld said that US forces were now “killing and capturing additional people every single day in that country. And their numbers are going down.”
But the United States, he said, was not alone in this fight as the Iraqi people were also supporting the coalition.
“Second, what’s happening is, in the last analysis, the Iraqi people are going to defeat the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime,” he added.
Mr Rumsfeld divided the opposition to US presence in Iraq into three groups, foreign fighters, others who have come from Iran and the remnants of the Baathist regime.
Mr Rumsfeld said these people were “motivated” by the desire to take Iraq back to the Saddam days but “I wouldn’t call that resolve” to fight. When a reporter reminded him that TV channels showed some people dancing after the crash, he said: “Citing a single young person dancing around, cheering, when something adverse happens, is a fact, I am sure, that there was somebody doing that.”
But, he said, it’s also a fact that there are 23 million people in that country who have been liberated, and the overwhelming majority was very much in support of the coalition. “They want Saddam Hussein gone.”
Mr Rumsfeld said the areas around Baghdad and north are hotbeds of opposition, but the overwhelming majority is not.
