Press Trust of India Posted online: Monday, September 15, 2003 at 1513 hours IST Updated: Monday, September 15, 2003 at 1546 hours IST
Washington, September 15: Even if a satisfactory UN resolution emerges on Iraq as a result of current discussions, the US may or may not get any additional troops for Iraq, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Monday.
"Those prospects seem to be waning. Where are the international troops going to be coming from, and at the end of that are we still looking at a picture of really a force that's 80 percent American anyway?”
"What we have now is, for the sake of argument, 1,20,000-1,30,000 Americans, and 20,000 or 25,000 international forces, the British, the polish division, and the like," Rumsfeld said when questioned about strength of international force in Iraq.
“The Polish division has 17 countries involved in it. And we have 56,000 Iraqis assisting with security. The Iraqi number is the one that's going up. If there is another UN resolution my guess is the most we could hope to get for, by way of additional international troops, would be something between 10,000 or 15,000, one division,” Rumsfeld said.
He said India "basically went south and said it wasn't going to be providing a significant number of troops. Your people at the Pentagon had hoped there would be Indian troops, had hoped there would be Pakistani troops, had hoped there would be Turkish troops." He said that the international forces would in any case be a smaller fraction than ours.
On the other hand, what's growing is the Iraqi contribution and that's terribly important.
