WASHINGTON, Oct 13: The United States is living a nightmare in Iraq and the best it can hope to achieve there is to avoid defeat, says America’s former military chief in Iraq.

Lt-Gen (retd) Ricardo Sanchez also labelled US political leaders as ‘incompetent’ and ‘corrupted’, adding that they would have faced courts martial for dereliction of duty had they been in the military.

“There is no question that America is living a nightmare with no end in sight,” Gen Sanchez told a convention of military journalists near Washington.

The Bush administration’s ‘surge’ policy, he said, was a ‘desperate attempt’ to make up for years of shortcomings. “The best we can do with this flawed approach is to stave off defeat,” he warned.

Gen Sanchez commanded US troops in Iraq from June 2003 to July 2004 and retired from the army last year. During his tenure, US troops captured Saddam Hussein and were also accused of grave human rights violations at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

At the briefing, Gen Sanchez lambasted the media as well for calling him a ‘liar’ and ‘torturer’ during the Abu Ghraib scandal, but directed most of his ire at the Bush administration. “From a catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan, to the administration’s latest surge strategy, this administration has failed to employ and synchronise the political, economic and military power,” he said.

“The administration, Congress and the entire inter-agency, especially the State Department, must shoulder the responsibility for this catastrophic failure and the American people must hold them accountable.”

Gen Sanchez said he realised there were serious challenges to the US military’s strategy in Iraq as soon as he became the top military commander in Iraq.

Asked why he did not speak out about his concerns, the former US commander said general officers took an oath to carry out the orders of the president while in uniform.

The US occupation in Iraq costs US taxpayers approximately $2 billion each week and thus far has resulted in the deaths of at 3,821 US service members. The congressional Government Accountability Office and the administration’s own Director of National Intelligence issued grim reports earlier this year about the lack of a functioning Iraqi government, inability of warring ethnic factions to reconcile their differences and unreliable security forces.