Rumsfeld: 'London attacks not Iraq retaliation'

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday rejected as “nonsense” the notion that recent terrorist attacks in London were retaliation for the US-led war in Iraq.

“Some people seem confused about the motivations and intentions of terrorists and about our coalition’s defence of the still young democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Rumsfeld said in a speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.

“They seem to cling to the discredited theory that the recent attacks in London and elsewhere, for example, are really in retaliation for the war in Iraq or for the so-called occupation of Afghanistan,” he added. “That is nonsense.”

In a videotape broadcast earlier yesterday, the second-in-command for the al-Qaida terrorist network, Ayman al-Zawahri, threatened more destruction in London, saying that British Prime Minister Tony Blair would be to blame.

Al-Zawahri also threatened the US with tens of thousands of military dead if it does not withdraw its troops from Iraq immediately.

Rumsfeld also paid tribute to the 21 Marines killed this week in Iraq, including the 14 killed on Wednesday by a single roadside bomb near the city of Haditha in western Iraq.

“Patriots, they were determined to stop the terrorists from reclaiming Iraq and from launching more attacks on our people,” he said. “Our nation needed them, called on them in battle, and mourns them now in death.”

Rumsfeld spoke broadly about US President George Bush’s rationale for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan – “the only way to defeat terrorism is to go after them where they are” – but said little about the administration’s plan for turning over the security mission in Iraq to the Iraqis. He did suggest that the goal is within reach.

“Once Iraq is safely in the hands of the Iraqi people, and a government that they elected under a new constitution … our troops will be able to … come home with the honour they will have earned,” he said, without elaborating.

In response to a question from his audience about the US military strategy in Iraq, Rumsfeld said that a key to getting US forces out of Iraq is getting enough Iraqi government forces trained to take over.

“We’re passing off pieces of real estate to the Iraqis as fast as they are capable of taking it over,” he said.

Meanwhile, Rumsfeld that for China’s booming economic system to continue to grow, the country must allow increased political freedom.

He said that that China’s growth required a relatively free economic system, ”and that means you’re going to have businessmen and tourists and people crawling all over your country.”

Rumsfeld said economic freedom would create tension between “the demands of a freer economic system” and China’s “relatively closed political system”.

“So the question is: Which is going to give?” Rumsfeld asked. “If it’s the economic system that gives, and it becomes less successful and much slower growth rate, then, obviously, the People’s Republic of China would be much less of a threat to the world.

“And to the extent the political system is what gives, and they have to open it up because they no longer can control it, … then obviously the economic system will continue to grow.”