WASHINGTON — Paul Wolfowitz, in his first public remarks on the Iraq war in years, said the American government was “pretty much clueless on counterinsurgency” in the first year of the war.

The former deputy secretary of defense said yesterday that the force sent to Iraq was adequate for fighting Saddam Hussein’s military, citing the speed with which American troops toppled the regime. But Mr. Wolfowitz said no one in the Bush administration anticipated that Saddam would order his security services to wage an insurgency after their formal defeat on the battlefield.

Mr. Wolfowitz’s remarks came at a forum for a new book, “War and Decision,” by the former no. 3 official at the Pentagon, Douglas Feith. In the book, Mr. Feith argues that America’s greatest mistake in the war was establishing a coalition provisional authority instead of installing a group of Iraqi exiles in an interim government until elections could be held.

Mr. Wolfowitz said he agreed with his old colleague. But his remarks yesterday have special relevance, because in the run-up to the war, the deputy secretary of defense downplayed testimony from a retired Army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, who told Congress that postwar stabilization operations would require several hundred thousand troops.

On February 27, 2003, Mr. Wolfowitz told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the estimate was “wildly off the mark.” Until 2007, Democrats often cited General Shinseki’s testimony in their critique of the war.

“There were two issues about enough troops,” Mr. Wolfowitz, who served as deputy defense secretary between 2001 and 2005, said yesterday. “One was enough troops for the major combat. A lot of people said we didn’t have it, and obviously we did. There was a very difficult balance that had to be struck between surprise, which meant a smaller force, and enough troops or a lot of troops, which meant a much slower force and potential of many disastrous consequences.”

But on the question of postwar troop levels, Mr. Wolfowitz said he would have preferred to augment the American presence with trained Iraqis. “The other ‘enough troops’ issue was enough troops for afterwards. And I think on that point, yeah, we were clueless on counterinsurgency,” he said.

A spokesman for the National Security Council, Gordon Johndroe, declined to comment, saying he had not yet seen the comments.

“I think I said in my comments quoting Doug’s book, no one anticipated this insurgency, a lot of people were slow to recognize it once it started,” Mr. Wolfowitz said. “And I do think a real failure — I assign responsibility all over the place — was not having enough reliable Iraqi troops early enough and fast enough, because I think a sensible counterinsurgency strategy would not be to flood the country with 300,000 Americans, but rather to build up Iraqi forces among the population.”

In the year before the war, the Pentagon, under Messrs. Wolfowitz and Feith, clashed with the State Department over the future role of Iraqi exile groups. The State Department favored cultivating Iraqis living in the country, while the Pentagon put its trust in a constellation of exile organizations and sought to make the group a government in exile.

By December 2002, the Bush administration had settled on the contours of an exile government that included Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, Iyad Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord, the two major Kurdish parties, and two Shiite Islamist parties hosted and trained by Iran, known as Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The latter Shiite group last year changed its name to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and, in a political alliance with Dawa, is the majority bloc that now controls the most votes in the Iraqi parliament. Prime Minister al-Maliki is a member of the Dawa Party.

It is unclear whether these organizations could have significantly augmented the American brigades in Iraq after the fall of Saddam in spring 2003. At the beginning of the war, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld publicly warned the militia associated with the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, known as the Badr Corps, to stay out of the fighting, as American intelligence suspected it had close ties to Iran. Mr. Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress had some fighters at the ready, though far fewer than likely would have been necessary for the kinds of operations the American military to this day is reluctant to turn over to an Iraqi army it has been training for five years. The militias affiliated with the two major Kurdish parties had fought a civil war that ended in 1996 and were likely to be distrusted by Arab Iraqis.

While the commanders of the American military in 2003 appeared loath to learn new ways of fighting an insurgency, two years later, the current commander of Multi-National Forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, rewrote the Vietnam War-era Army counterinsurgency manual. His new strategy, which emphasizes the protection of the population and seeks to reduce the power of Al Qaeda and other insurgent groups by winning the population’s loyalty and cutting membership in the groups, is credited with reducing violence against American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.