US President George W. Bush has acknowledged for the first time that he made a "miscalculation of what the conditions would be" in post-war Iraq, the New York Times reported Friday.

In an interview with the newspaper, Bush insisted that the 17-month insurgency that has undermined the administration's plans for Iraq was the unwanted by-product of a "swift victory" against former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Bush said his strategy had been "flexible enough" to respond to the insurgency and that even now it is adjusting to conditions in places like Najaf where US forces are battling one of the most militant of the Shiite groups opposing the interim government.

Bush strenuously defends his Iraq policy, reiterating his view that it was right for the United States to go to war with Iraq even though it has failed to find evidence of the country possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which prompted the invasion in the first place.

Thanks to the war, Bush told a Republican rally recently "we removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing WMD and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them...In the world after Sept. 11, that was a risk we could not afford to take."

The US Department of Defense says 969 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of the US-led war against the country in March 2003. Of these, 828 were killed after Bush declared major combat operations in Iraq at an end on May 1, 2003.
 
(Xinhua News Agency  August 28, 2004)