Powell Forces Rice to Defend Iraq Planning

Iraqi police and U.S. soldiers patrol Baqouba after two days of fighting there between Iraqi government forces and insurgents Friday April 28, 2006 in Baqouba, 60 kilometers (35 miles) northeast of Baghdad, Iraq. The fighting in the Baqouba area erupted Thursday when insurgents using mortar rounds, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire attacked five police checkpoints, a police station and an Iraqi army headquarters, and so far Iraqi officials have said seven Iraqi soldiers and 49 insurgents were killed and 74 others were arrested. (AP Photo/Mohammed Adnan) (Mohammed Adnan - AP)

WASHINGTON -- Just back from Baghdad and eager to discuss promising developments, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice found herself knocked off message Sunday, forced to defend prewar planning and troop levels against an unlikely critic _ Colin Powell, her predecessor at the State Department.

For the Bush administration, it was a rare instance of in-house dissenter going public.

On Rice's mind was the political breakthrough that had brought her and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to Iraq last week and cleared the way for formation of a national unity government.

Yet Powell sideswiped her by revisiting the question of whether the U.S. had a large enough force to oust Saddam Hussein and then secure the peace.

He said he advised Bush before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 to send more troops to Iraq, but that the administration did not follow his recommendation.

Rice, Bush's national security adviser during the run-up to the war, neither confirmed nor denied Powell's assertion. But she spent a good part of her appearances on three Sunday talk shows reaching into the past to defend the White House, which is trying to highlight the positive to a public increasingly skeptical in this election year of the president's conduct of the war and concerned about the large U.S. military presence.

"I don't remember specifically what Secretary Powell may be referring to, but I'm quite certain that there were lots of discussions about how best to fulfill the mission that we went into Iraq," Rice said.

"And I have no doubt that all of this was taken into consideration. But that when it came down to it, the president listens to his military advisers who were to execute the plan," she told CNN's "Late Edition."

Powell, in an interview broadcast Sunday in London, said he gave the advice to now retired Gen. Tommy Franks, who developed and executed the Iraq invasion plan, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld while the president was present.

"I made the case to General Franks and Secretary Rumsfeld before the president that I was not sure we had enough troops," Powell said in an interview on Britain's ITV television. "The case was made, it was listened to, it was considered. ... A judgment was made by those responsible that the troop strength was adequate."

In an interview with AARP The Magazine released Sunday, Powell did not say what advice he gave Bush about whether to go to war. Known to be less hawkish than Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and some other presidential advisers, Powell implied he had been more cautious.

"The decisions that were made were not made by me or Mr. Cheney or Rumsfeld. They were made by the president of the United States," he said.