February 04, 2007	Sunday	Muharram 15, 1428

WASHINGTON: Even if US President George W. Bush’s new Iraq plan succeeds militarily by quelling violence in Baghdad, US spy agencies warn, the war-torn country’s political leaders may fail to avert disaster.

Declassified portions of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), the consensus view of all 16 US spy agencies, painted a grim picture on Friday of the prospects for the embattled president’s “new way forward.” The publicly-released NIE “key judgments” buttress Bush’s position in some ways -- cautioning against a hasty US withdrawal -- but challenge some of the basic underpinnings of the revamped strategy he unveiled on Jan 10.

Bush has ordered 21,500 more US combat troops to Iraq in an effort to pacify the capital and al-Anbar province and give the fledgling Baghdad government breathing room to pursue last-ditch efforts at political reconciliation.

But where the president’s plan calls for handing Iraq’s security forces control over their country by November, the NIE warns they “will be hard-pressed in the next 12-18 months” to take on key new roles.

And “even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation,” it said.

The White House pounced on the report’s dire warning of “spiralling violence and political disarray,” with possible intervention by Iraq’s neighbours and increased attacks by Al Qaeda if US forces stage a hasty withdrawal.

“Stepping back now would be a prescription for fast failure and a chaos that would envelope not only Iraq, but also the region, and could potentially, by giving Al Qaeda a safe haven in Iraq, result in risk and threats to the United States,” said national security adviser Stephen Hadley.

At the same time, Hadley and other top senior national security aides quickly found themselves on the defensive over whether, as the report warns, the nearly four-year-old conflict bears the hallmarks of civil war.

“It’s not an adequate description of the situation we find ourselves,” he said, quoting the NIE’s findings that “the term ‘civil war’ does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq.” But the report went on to say that “the term ‘civil war’ accurately describes key elements of the Iraqi conflict, including the hardening of ethno-sectarian identities, a sea change in the character of the violence, ethno-sectarian mobilisation, and population displacements.” “It’s not, I think, just a matter of politics or semantics. I think it oversimplifies it. It’s a bumper sticker answer to what’s going on in Iraq,” said US Defence Secretary Robert Gates.

“This isn’t a divided army, a divided government in the sense that I have always thought of a civil war,” Gates told reporters.

On another front, the NIE seemed to pour cold water on the White House’s efforts to blame Iran for attacks on US forces and make Tehran out to be a critical destabilising force in Iraq.

The report agreed that “Iranian lethal support for select groups of Iraqi Shia militants clearly intensifies the conflict in Iraq.” However, the involvement of Iran or Syria in Iraq “is not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq’s internal sectarian dynamics,” it said.—AFP