<<"Overall, the administration has put stunningly little planning into how the political process might unfold in Iraq after the war," said Nancy Soderberg who served on the National Security Council under former President Bill Clinton (news - web sites) and now works with the International Crisis Group in New York.
"Their ideological assumptions have constantly been confounded by reality," Soderberg said.
Braude said there was no question of U.S. forces withdrawing from Iraq at least until it was sure it was leaving a viable state that had the ability to maintain its territorial integrity.
That could take years since it means building a new, ideologically revamped Iraqi army of perhaps 150,000 -- the minimum sufficient to defend against an Iranian military next door of half a million. The two countries were at war for much of the 1980s.
In the meantime, the Americans and their Iraqi partners face the monumental task of rebuilding a legal framework that could help run a society based on the rule of law in which commercial life can flourish free of corruption.
That means writing criminal and civil laws, recruiting police, judges, lawyers, prison administrators and eventually writing a constitution. At this point, no one knows who will do these things and when.
Many analysts, including Slaughter and Soderberg, believe that President Bush (news - web sites) will have no choice but to swallow his reluctance to invite the United Nations (news - web sites) to help share the task of running Iraq until sufficient physical, political and legal infrastructure is up and running.>>
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