US scales down goals in Iraq

2005-08-14 13:29

Washington - The administration of President George W Bush is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognising that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

Citing unnamed officials in Washington and Baghdad, the newspaper said Washington no longer expected to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society, in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges.

"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," the report quotes one senior official as saying. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."

The debate over a new Iraqi constitution has particularly driven home the gap between the original US goals and the realities almost 28 months after the US-led invasion of the country, The Post said.

The United State initially planned to build Iraq as a secular and modern country that honours human rights and unites disparate ethnic and religious communities.

But the paper said the document on which Iraq's future will be built will require laws to be compliant with Islam.

Kurds and Shiites are expecting de facto long-term political privileges. And women's rights will not be as firmly entrenched as Washington has tried to insist, the report said.

"We set out to establish a democracy, but we're slowly realising we will have some form of Islamic republic," The Post quotes another US official as saying.

According to the paper, US officials now acknowledge that they misread the strength of the sentiment among Kurds and Shiites to create a special status for their communities.

- AFP