Top US officials grudgingly acknowledge that their post-Saddam Hussein plan for rebuilding Iraq has been substantially flawed on the security front, the Washington Times reported Thursday.

Some defense officials said privately in interviews that the plan in place for security after Baghdad's fall has been an utter failure, according to the report.

They said the administration failed to predict any significant resistance from Saddam loyalists, much less the deadly combination of Ba'athist holdouts and foreign terrorists preying daily on American troops.

"Every briefing on postwar Iraq I attended never mentioned any of this," said a civilian policy adviser.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said in an interview this week with regional reporters that the Bush administration "underestimated" two developments.

"The first is that 35 years of Saddam Hussein's reign instilled into the hearts and into the souls of the Iraqi people a greater degree of terror than we understood," Armitage said. "The second was the nature or the extent to which Iraq had become full of criminal enterprise."

Armitage suggested that US forces were facing thousands of resisters when he listed the varied enemy: two divisions of Republican Guard soldiers who did not fight during the invasion, Ansar Islam terrorists, foreign fighters, Ba'athists and "a certain amount of criminal enterprise."

Since US President George W. Bush declared an end to major hostilities on May 1, guerrillas have killed 65 American troops.
 
(Xinhua News Agency August 29, 2003)