Iraq needs time to build its military: Rumsfeld

Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, appearing separately on Sunday talk shows, agreed Iraq will shape its own government and will reflect its political and social demands in that system, not those of the United States. The role religion will play will be for Iraqis to decide, Cheney said.

"This is going to be Iraqi, whatever it is. It's not going to be American. It's not going to look like Wyoming or New York when they get their political process all put together," Cheney told "Fox News Sunday."

Rumsfeld said he doubts Iraq will choose a theocratic system mirroring that of Iran, a choice he said would be "a terrible mistake."

Rumsfeld said he doesn't believe President Bush's State of the Union declaration that US 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.

"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."

"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."

Some 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 Baghdad government might do.

"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.

He said the Iranian government was "a religious theocracy that has been a dismal failure, from the standpoint of the rights of individuals."

Speaking of the future Iraqi government on NBC's "Meet the Press," Rumsfeld said: "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."