BAGHDAD, Sept 6: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wound up a three-day inspection of troubled Iraq on Saturday and insisted the Iraqi people take more responsibility for security in the US-occupied country.

Rumsfeld also acknowledged the security crisis here may have had its roots in the US failure to chase down Saddam Hussein’s forces during the war and to anticipate the type of problems it would face afterwards.

“It’s important for the Iraqi people to stand up and take responsibility by providing information to General Sanchez to a greater extent than they are already doing,” he told a news conference before leaving for Kuwait.

“I have always believed that foreign forces in a country are unnatural, they are an anomaly,” Rumsfeld said. “To the extent that you flood the zone and bury this country in security forces ... you create this heavy unnatural presence.

“To the extent that you do that, there can be a tendency for the people not to accept their responsibilities and for people to point fingers and expect the foreign forces to make life perfect.”

Rumsfeld said that one of the contributing factors to the current instability in Iraq was the fact “that the war was never finished” and Saddam’s forces never completely eradicated.

“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,” he said.

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 that followed 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.

Rumsfeld earlier flew to the ruins of Babylon to meet with officers and troops of a 21-nation division holding down a large chunk of south-central Iraq under Polish command in what he called “a major accomplishment”.

While Rumsfeld pressed his first-hand review of Iraq’s security needs for a third day, an additional 120 British troops were to arrive from their rear base in Cyprus, a military spokesman said.

The reinforcements came with Washington working on two fronts to bolster security, offering crash training programmes to double the size of the various Iraqi services and seeking a UN mandate for an expanded international force.

The British contingent includes 120 fresh troops from the Second Light Infantry, a military spokesman said.

Mr Rumsfeld took a helicopter on Saturday to the ruins of Babylon to meet with officers and troops of the 21-nation division holding down a large chunk of south-central Iraq.

“This is a major accomplishment,” said the US defence chief, whose country currently has 130,000 troops trying to tame Iraq since the ouster of Saddam Hussein in April.

The US defence chief, winding down his Iraqi tour before heading for Afghanistan, said “a wonderful start has been made” toward restoring political leadership here but “the economic circumstance has to improve still more”.—AFP/dpa