WASHINGTON — In an unusual public criticism by one of the United States' staunchest allies, the president of Poland said Thursday that he had been "misled" about Iraq's alleged stocks of banned weapons before the war.
Speaking to reporters in Warsaw, President Aleksander Kwasniewski said that Iraq "without Saddam Hussein is truly better than Iraq with Saddam Hussein," but observed that "naturally, I also feel uncomfortable, due to the fact that we were misled with the information on weapons of mass destruction."
His comments, provided in a government transcript, came amid growing anxiety among a number of key U.S. allies four days after Spanish voters tossed out the government that had sent troops to Iraq.
Among governments in Europe that supported the war, "there's a rush for the exits," said Radek Sikorski, a former deputy foreign minister of Poland now at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington. He predicted that politicians' concern about the Spanish election would drive many governments that have sided with the U.S. on Iraq to align themselves more closely with France and Germany, which had opposed the war. Other analysts have said such pressure may particularly be at play in Italy and Romania.
In an interview Thursday on PBS' "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz responded sharply to Kwasniewski's comments.
"I don't think he has a right to say they were misled," Wolfowitz said. There were intelligence failures in Iraq, Wolfowitz acknowledged, but "nobody was misleading anybody.... When somebody tells you their best estimate of a situation and it turns out to be wrong ... that's life."
Meanwhile, in another blow to the U.S. effort in Iraq, South Korea said today that it would not send 3,000 troops to the northern city of Kirkuk as planned and would look to place them in a safer city.
"Our objective in sending troops is to assist in the rebuilding of Iraq, not to get involved in aggressive actions such as the crackdown on terrorist groups," said a South Korean official, who asked not to be quoted by name.
The official said the main reason was the deteriorating security situation in Kirkuk. He conceded, however, that last week's bombing in Madrid, which killed 202 people and may have been conducted by Islamic terrorists retaliating for Spain's support of the Iraq war, might have had an "indirect effect" on the decision.
