BAGHDAD, Sept 6: Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted on Saturday that the United States may have paved the way for the attacks now plaguing its troops in Iraq by failing to destroy Saddam Hussein’s forces in their northern strongholds.

Mr Rumsfeld acknowledged that pre-war US planning had also failed to correctly anticipate the sort of problems that the US-led coalition would be confronted with following the ouster of Saddam’s regime.

He made the comments at a Baghdad news conference as he wrapped up a three-day inspection tour, his second here since the war, amid persistent attacks on US troops in the ousted dictator’s heartlands north and west of the capital that have now cost more lives than the actual invasion.

“One of the things that took place in this country that I think contributed to the circumstance we are in today — the security circumstance — was that the war was never finished,” Rumsfeld said.

“Most of the battles that took place were south. As Baghdad was approached, the forces north of Baghdad fought for a period but at some point melted into the countryside.

“As a result there are still Baathist elements that are there causing the security problem,” he said.

Mr Rumsfeld conceded that pre-war planning had also focussed on preparing for worst-case scenarios like a humanitarian or environmental disaster, rather than the explosion of criminality which actually rolled over Iraq after the entry of US troops.

“We spent a great deal of time thinking through and planning for a host of terrible things that could have happened but that didn’t happen,” Rumsfeld said.

“In a war there is always the possibility of a humanitarian disaster — 10 years ago there were serious problems with internally displaced people and refugees.

“The experience in the (1991) Gulf war of oil wells burning ... was something that concerned us greatly — the environmental disaster in that instance was just terrible.

“What one does is plan for things that could be serious, serious problems and then, as you go forward, you have to deal with the world as you find it.

“I must say that we did not anticipate that Saddam Hussein in October ... would open up the prisons and release some large number in excess of 100,000 criminals and people to be turned loose on the Iraqi people,” he said. —AFP