"WHITE HOUSE SILENT on Bremer Troop Request"

[Bluebear]

Cat got your tongue, George?


WASHINGTON - The White House refused to say Tuesday whether the top U.S. civilian official in Iraq after Saddam Hussein's ouster had asked the president for more troops to deal with the rapid descent of postwar Iraq into chaos.

n remarks published Tuesday, the official, L. Paul Bremer, said he arrived in Iraq on May 6, 2003 to find "horrid" looting and a very unstable situation — throwing new fuel onto the presidential campaign issue of whether the United States had sufficiently planned for the post-war situation in Iraq.

"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," Bremer said during an address to an insurance group in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. The group released a summary of his remarks in Washington.

"We never had enough troops on the ground," Bremer said, while insisting that he was "more convinced than ever that regime change was the right thing to do."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan refused to say whether Bremer had pleaded with Bush for more troops. "We never get into reading out all the conversations they had," McClellan said.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041005/ap_on_re_us/bremer_iraq_9