Rumsfeld: Iraq needs time to build forces

WASHINGTON -- Iraq will need time to build up forces sufficient to handle a potential threat from its neighbors -- specifically Iran -- even after Baghdad proves capable of overcoming the insurgency at home, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Sunday.\nBoth Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, in comments during Sunday talk shows, brushed off concern that Islam could guide Iraq's new government. Cheney said Iraq will shape its own government, and Rumsfeld predicted that choosing a system mirroring that of Iran would be "a terrible mistake."\nRumsfeld said he doesn't believe President Bush's State of the Union declaration that U.S. troops will leave Iraq when the country "is democratic, representative of all its people, at peace with its neighbors, and able to defend itself" means American forces will be there for years to come.\n"What he meant was that the Iraqis' internal security forces would be capable of managing the security situation inside the country," Rumsfeld told ABC's "This Week."\n"It will take some time after that before they would have the kind of capability to dissuade Iran, for example, if Iran decided to try to conduct a war with them again," Rumsfeld said.\nSome religious leaders in Iraq say they want Islam to be a guiding principle of the Iraqi constitution to be written. Cheney urged caution in forecasting what a future Iraqi government might do. He said Iraqis will determine the role of religion in their government as well as its others tenets.\n"This is going to be Iraqi, whatever it is. It's not going to be American," Cheney told "Fox News Sunday."\n"I don't think, at this stage, that there's anything like justification for hand-wringing or concern on the part of Americans that somehow they're going to produce a result we won't like," the vice president said.\nCheney said the Iranian government was "a religious theocracy that has been a dismal failure, from the standpoint of the rights of individuals." Rumsfeld added that he doubts Iraq will model its government after Iran's Shiite theocracy.\n"I think it would just be an enormous mistake for that country to think that it could succeed with all of its opportunity -- with its oil, its water, its intelligent population -- to deny half of their population, women, to participate fully, I think just would be a terrible mistake," Rumsfeld said on NBC's "Meet the Press."\nRumsfeld said no one can know how long it will take to train various forces to secure Iraq internally, dismissing analysts' predictions of at least two years. One of several factors, he told ABC, is the behavior of Iran and Syria and "the extent to which they're going to be unhelpful or helpful."\nSyria has not done all it can to ease the insurgency in Iraq, Rumsfeld said, nor has it released millions of dollars in Iraqi assets. "There is no doubt that the Baathists are located in Syria, from Iraq," the secretary told "Late Edition" on CNN.\n"Syria has not been helpful" -- nor, he added on CBS's "Face the Nation," has been Iran.\nSen. Edward M. Kennedy questioned why Iraqi forces take longer than American troops to train for security duties.\n"Why can't they defend their own country?" asked Kennedy, D-Mass. "How long do we have to have Americans fighting and dying? How long do we have to ask the taxpayers to continue to pay out?"\nKennedy said the administration should set a goal with Iraq for bringing home U.S. troops by 2006.