After Iraq, more U.S. caution on preemptive attacks: Gates

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: U.S. presidents will likely take a more cautious approach before launching preemptive attacks after the intelligence failure of the Iraq war, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said. “The lessons learned with the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction and some of the other things that happened will make any future president very, very cautious about launching that kind of conflict or relying on intelligence,” Gates told PBS television in an interview on Wednesday. Any future president is “going to ask a lot of very hard questions and I think that hurdle is much higher today than it was six or seven years ago,” he said. “In the run-up to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration argued the regime’s alleged weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent threat. But no WMD stockpiles were ever found,” the BBC said. “I think one of the biggest lessons learned in this, is if you are going to contemplate preempting an attack, you had better be very confident of the intelligence that you have,” he said. Gates, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said that stricter criteria – including more reliable intelligence – would have to be met before taking preemptive military action. He said there was no link between recent armed attacks in Iraq and Obama’s decision last month to withdraw most combat troops out of Iraq by the end of August, 2010. “I don’t think that there is a correlation between the president’s announcement and the spike in violence,” he said. SH (S)/SR 1