Wolfowitz raps Hill for cutting Iraq army funds

HILLA, Iraq — Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz accused the House of Representatives yesterday of damaging Iraqi security by cutting in half the Senate-approved $200 million allocation for building Iraqi and Afghan army units.

He also complained of a continuing bureaucratic “logjam” in both the House and the Senate, which he said was stopping any funding being funneled to the Department of Defense, unless it was specifically designated for the two countries’ regular armies.

Anything other than supporting or training a regular army was being interpreted as a foreign-affairs function, which he described as “a lot of doctrine.”

He said that funding through the State Department led to “slow but methodical” activity — inappropriate, he asserted, in a time of war.

“What we’d like is the full $200 million and full authority for [use in training and equipping] any security forces at all,” Mr. Wolfowitz told a small group of reporters before taking a helicopter flight from this Shi’ite city to the Sunni-dominated former Saddam Hussein stronghold of Tikrit.

He said that, in his talks in Iraq so far, there had been a strong emphasis on creating the non-regular security units, and they needed proper funding.

Both the Civil Defense Corps and the new police, he said, in recent days had distinguished themselves by making arrests and breaking up potential clashes. The Iraqi Civil Defense Corps cleaned out a mosque where hard-liners were holed up.

He also praised the Iraqi police for getting to a gang shootout before coalition troops could show up.

“They are fighting effectively for their country, and we are interested in expanding that capacity as fast as possible,” he said. “The sooner it happens, the better.”

Mr. Wolfowitz also signaled a change of emphasis in the recruitment of former Iraqi army officers to the new Iraqi defense force and two new security agencies.

One of the first decrees of L. Paul Bremer, Iraq’s top U.S. civilian administrator, was to disband the entire Iraqi army, which led to a riot and two deaths of disgruntled army personnel demanding reinstatement and salaries. A later reversal saw agreement to pay the salaries as pensions, but the new army recruitment has left the majority of previous soldiers jobless.

“We have [already] been rehiring previous army officers. There is certainly no prejudice against previous officers — no desire to keep them out, if they have a clean record, and the great majority of them have, certainly if they were in the regular army,” Mr. Wolfowitz said.

Meanwhile, a mortar attack killed two American soldiers and wounded four others yesterday at an outpost north of Baghdad, and a third American died in a gunbattle in the northern city of Mosul, the U.S. military said.

The mortar attack occurred about noon at a 4th Infantry Division forward operating base near Samara, 70 miles north of Baghdad, the U.S. Central Command said.

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