Monday, November 3, 2003; Page A01
(snip)
Two influential senators said yesterday the answer may be an increase in U.S. forces. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on CBS's "Face the Nation" that "in the short term, we may need more American forces in there while we're training these people up." He said the administration also needed to enlist European allies by giving them a greater say in the postwar enterprise. Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), the committee chairman, echoed Biden's comments on the same program.
But Rumsfeld said that although the number of U.S. troops in Iraq has declined from 150,000 to 130,000, "the total number of the security forces in the country has been going up steadily" because the number of forces contributed by other countries has remained steady at 30,000 and the number of Iraqi forces has "gone from zero on May 1st up to over 100,000 today."
Rumsfeld said "it's the totality of those three that needs to go up, and it is going up steadily. And there has not been a need for additional U.S. forces."
The administration has not explained why its estimate of the number of Iraqi forces has risen so rapidly. On Oct. 9, L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, told a news conference in Baghdad that 60,000 Iraqis were providing security to their country. On Thursday, about three weeks later, Rice told foreign reporters the overall number was "over 85,000 and growing." That same day, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told an audience at Georgetown University the figure was "some 80,000 to 90,000."
On Saturday, the day before Rumsfeld said there were more than 100,000, a senior official in the occupation authority provided a figure of nearly 85,000, which included 50,000 police, 20,000 in the facility protection service, 7,800 in the civil defense corps, 5,000 border guards and 1,400 in a new Iraqi army.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55016-2003Nov2.html