The "Quackmire" management by Bush is graded by the experts and fails. They even want the UN to come in now and help because our "liberation" of Iraq has become a colossal failure.

US fails post-war Iraq examination
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - In a sign of flagging confidence in the Bush administration's performance in post-war Iraq, a task force from the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has called for the occupation authority to give the United Nations a much greater role in establishing Iraqi political institutions, among other measures.

In a 25-page report, former UN ambassador Thomas Pickering and former defense secretary James Schlesinger offered what they politely called "several recommendations for mid-course adjustments" in the US-dominated occupation which appeared, however, to amount to a vote of no-confidence in Washington's course to date.

As a first step, it said, President George W Bush should give a major foreign policy address to the nation to explain the importance of the mission, as well as the costs and risks of US engagement there, subjects that senior US officials have preferred to avoid to date.

The implicit and, at times, explicit criticism contained in the report is particularly remarkable given the prominence of the two authors, who chair a CFR task force in Iraq of 25 former senior US policy makers and regional experts. Pickering, the highest-ranking US diplomat when he retired from the foreign service in the mid-1990s, served as former president George H W Bush's ambassador to the UN during the first Gulf War in 1991.

Schlesinger, who served in several cabinet positions under a number of Republican presidents, was an outspoken supporter of the decision to go to war in Iraq and has long been close to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who is responsible for US military operations in Iraq and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) headed by the civilian administrator, L Paul Bremer.

The report faults the administration for "a series of false starts" and failing to offer any clear "vision and strategy" for Iraq's political future, to more aggressively engage Iraqi leaders at all levels, to speak with one voice about how it will deal with Iraqi oil, and to encourage the active involvement of the UN secretary general's special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, in stabilizing the situation and building international support for reconstruction.

And, in advice which the administration is unlikely to want to hear at the moment, it calls for Washington to make clear that it will be prepared to sustain the some 200,000 US troops currently deployed in and around Iraq "for as long as necessary".

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EF27Ak01.html