WASHINGTON, August 14 (RIA Novosti, Arkady Orlov) - The Bush administration is lowering its expectations on Iraq, The Washington Post said Sunday, referring to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad. "What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion.According to The Washington Post, the United States no longer expects to see in Iraq a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges. The newspaper says that Baghdad's 6 million people go without electricity for days, unemployment in the whole of Iraq is 50 percent to 65 percent and Iraqis continue to die in terrorist attacks.
According to data of the Iraqi Health Ministry, 4,000 civilians have been killed in Baghdad alone since Prime Minister's Ibrahim Jafari's interim government took office on April 28, 2005.
Oil production is estimated at 2.22 million barrels a day, below Iraq's pre-war level of 2.67 million barrels a day.
"State industries, electricity are all below what they were before we got there," said Wayne White, former head of the State Department's Iraq intelligence team who is now at Washington's Middle East Institute."
"The administration says Saddam ran down the country. But most damage was from looting (after the invasion), which took down state industries, large private manufacturing, the national electric system," Wayne White told the newspaper.
