by Carlos Hamann
WASHINGTON, Sept 14 (AFP) - Given the chaos in Iraq the United States should re-think how to define success in the country, and lower expectations, three influential experts said Tuesday.
The comments came as some 73 people were killed in a Baghdad car bombing and in an ambush on police in Baquba, claimed by Al-Qaeda-linked militants, and as fighting flared between US troops and Iraqi insurgents.
In the original projections for post-war, Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign policy expert with the Brookings Institution, did not expect to see "a snowballing resistance" of former Saddam Hussein supporters and foreign Al-Qaeda linked terrorists.
"We're in must worst shape than we thought we'd ever be given how well the war (against Saddam) proceeded," said O'Hanlon.
What happened was that many "fence-sitters who didn't like Saddam and . . . were never convinced we were there to help them" are now fighting for nationalist and anti-Colonial reasons, he said.
O'Hanlon has written extensively on the region and discussed Iraqi reconstruction before the invasion with neoconservative US planners such as Richard Perle, who have the ear of President George W. Bush.
Increased violence becomes "a vicious cycle": more Iraqis are killed every day and infrastructure projects further delayed, "exacerbating the very problems that contribute to the psychology that then leads more people to join the resistance," he said.
From the US strategic interest, success in Iraq at this point is "to simply not let things get worse and ultimately train the Iraqi security forces" to take over from the US-led forces over the next two or three years, O'Hanlon said.
The United States should start preparing for the day when an Iraqi government formally asks US forces to leave, said Rick Barton, a Center for Strategic and International Studies scholar who works on post-conflict reconstruction.
"It'll happen a lot sooner than we had anticipated," he said, estimating that a request could come within a year or less.
In the meantime US forces "might be looking at the Kabul model" to maintain security in Iraq, with an emphasis on security in Baghdad and the Shiite Holy Cities of Najaf and Karbala.
Seventy percent of Iraqis live in cities, and until there is security "it'll be hard to change Iraqi public opinion," Barton said.
Bathsheba Crocker, another CSIS reconstruction scholar, said it was key for authority on issues ranging from security to local government to increasingly be handed over to Iraqis.
Crocker, who co-authored a detailed report with Barton measuring progress in post-Saddam Iraq, said their data based on interviews shows that Iraqis are guardedly optimistic about the future.
But the results are "much more fragile" than earlier anticipated, she said.
Of grave concern was a lack of momentum towards positive trends. "What we're seeing is backwards movement and stagnation," Crocker said.