IRAQ: Former US secretary of state Colin Powell said yesterday that he advised President George Bush to send more troops to Iraq to deal with the aftermath of the invasion.
Mr Powell told ITV that Mr Bush, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and military commander Gen Tommy Franks rejected his warning that the US had too few soldiers in Iraq to deal with unforeseen circumstances. "The aftermath turned out to be much more difficult than anyone had anticipated. I don't think we had enough force there to impose order . . . The president's military advisers felt that the size of the force was adequate. They may still feel that years later. Some of us don't. I don't," he said.
Mr Powell's successor Condoleezza Rice said the president listened to advice from many sources before the invasion but paid most attention to what military commanders told him.
"When the war plan was put together, it was put together, also, with consideration of what would happen after Saddam Hussein was actually overthrown," she told ABC's This Week.
The Bush administration, meanwhile, has expressed relief at the choice of Jawad al-Maliki as Iraq's new prime minister, ending a four-month impasse.
A growing number of US military officers and security experts believe, however, that partitioning Iraq may be the only way to prevent the country from plunging into civil war.
In a new book Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq, Ahmed Hashim, a professor at the US Naval War College who has served two tours in Iraq as a reservist, says the US now faces a stark choice. It can allow a civil war to happen or it can try to prevent it by dividing the country among Shias, Sunnis and Kurds.
Prof Hashim, whose book blames America's "cultural ignorance" for the quagmire in Iraq, concludes that partition "is the option that can allow us to leave with honour intact".
Retired marine Col TX Hammes, a counter-insurgency expert who has trained forces in Iraq, told the Washington Post yesterday that the US should consider "soft partition" to prevent a civil war that could spill over Iraq's borders.
Other military experts argue the US should allow civil war to occur. Retired major Isaiah Wilson said it was time to give civil war a chance. "For Iraq, as ironic and illogical as it may seem, a true and sustainable future may come in the aftermath of the very sectarian-based civil war we have been striving to prevent."