Bushco Out of the Military Loop?

Are you "pistoff" about what happened on September 11, 2001? Are you "pistoff" that terrorists recently attempted to kill 80,000 people in Jordan, using WMD from Syria?

Washington risks plunging Iraq into further chaos by employing Saddam Hussein generals to appease an anti-U.S. insurgency, Iraqi leaders once in the forefront of opposition to the ousted dictator said on Sunday.

U.S. forces turned to General Jasim Mohamed Saleh, who headed a battalion in the disbanded Republican Guards, and another Sunni Muslim general for help in pacifying Falluja after U.S. forces besieged the city west of Baghdad for nearly a month.

U.S. military leaders insist, however, Saleh has not been given control of Falluja.

While acknowledging that Saleh, from the Sunni Muslim Dulaimi tribe, could help calm Falluja, politicians and Governing Council members said Iraq would become more unstable in the longer run as the United States puts defeated Baath Party members back in senior positions.

"The Americans seem to think they are in a kitchen, constantly cooking a meal in which ingredients are thrown in until something works," said Hamid al-Bayati, a senior official in the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

"They failed to defeat the Baathists so they hire Saddam's generals. They arm and prop up a police force, which they later discover is full of insurgents," Bayati told Reuters.

But U.S. military chiefs responded swiftly to suggestions they had put Saleh in charge of Falluja by saying he had not yet been vetted.

U.S. armed forces' senior commander, General Richard B. Myers, said he did not believe Saleh would be chosen to lead a peacekeeping operation in the city. He said a couple of people were being looked at.

"They have to be vetted in Baghdad by the Coalition Provisional Authority and by the Iraqi minister of defense. That process is not complete. There's another general they're looking at. My guess is, it will not be General Saleh," Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told ABC's This Week programme.

TAINTED IN IRAQI EYES

Saleh's critics say he served in the Medina Division, entrusted with defending Baghdad. Saleh told Reuters on Sunday Saddam dismissed him from the army a month before the war and played down his brigade's role in keeping Saddam in power.

Saddam, who did not trust the regular army, elevated the Republican Guards into a praetorian guard which crushed Kurdish and Shi'ite uprisings. Bayati said Saleh would always be tainted by that connection in the eyes of Iraqis.

Republican Guards officers, especially those from Saddam's home region of Tikrit, abandoned Baghdad after the invasion, fearing reprisals by groups such as the Supreme Council.

U.S. governor Paul Bremer disbanded Iraq's 400,000-strong armed forces and security agencies last May along with the defence and information ministries.

Concern in the former opposition has been growing that the United States would include former members of Saddam's party in an interim government due to take power in July.

Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi likened this possibility to the United States putting Nazis in charge of the German government immediately after a World War Two.

A senior U.S. official in Baghdad said, however, that just as senior officers in Hitler's army eventually had to be used to staff the reformed postwar German army, some Iraqi generals would have to be brought back.

Careful vetting would insure that "no one with blood on their hands" was appointed, the official said.

Chalabi and senior Shi'ite cleric Mohammad Bahr al-Uloum were among the signatories of a statement denouncing the U.S. decision to hire Saleh.

"The command of Saleh's brigade and many of its members repressed the people in the uprising of March 1991 and supported Saddam's regime throughout his dictatorial rule."

An official of the U.S.-led occupying authority said the "deBathification" policy remained solid.