WASHINGTON, April 4: While the US military battles for control of Iraqi territory, senior American policymakers are struggling in Washington over a post-Saddam Hussein political future for the country, officials said on Friday.

In President George Bush’s two-year-old administration such internecine power battles, pitting the State Department and the Pentagon, are a regular feature of decision-making.

But with US troops claiming to be on the doorstop of Baghdad, even administration supporters have lost patience with the internal bickering.

“These fights shouldn’t be going on,” said Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank with close ties to the administration.

“They reflect poorly on us and on the unity of will in the administration. It cannot but hurt us in post-Saddam Iraq.”

US News and World Report reported on its website on Thursday that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, trying to bring the matter to a head, had urged Bush to install an Iraqi government immediately, even as the war continues.

But a State Department official said: “It hasn’t been worked out, what the functions are, who’s right for the particular jobs and when they would go.”

According to Pletka and other like-minded experts, the dispute centers on how radically to change Iraq.

State “has never been wild about the war (and) does not appear to be bubbling with enthusiasm about the possibilities for the Arab world’s first democracy,” Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote in The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine.