Secret US report scorns Bush policy attacks Middle East policy

A classified State Department report has poured scorn on George Bush's much-touted policy that a military invasion of Iraq will lead to a flowering of democracy across the Middle East.

The report, leaked to the Los Angeles Times, is the latest indication of divisions within the Bush administration on the goals and even the wisdom of the war it is itching to start. And it offers a rebuke to neo-conservatives whose grandiose theories about refashioning the world in America's image have been central to the Iraq enterprise from the start.

"Political changes conducive to broader and enduring stability throughout the region will be difficult to achieve for a very long time," the report says. It cites corruption, serious infrastructure degradation and overpopulation as reasons to doubt whether any kind of stability, much less fully functioning democratic government, will be possible in the foreseeable future, in Iraq or in many of its neighbours. "Liberal democracy would be difficult to achieve," the report goes on. And it warns that any electoral democracy would be subject to exploitation by "anti- American elements" – a reference to the Islamist parties that American foreign policy has been at pains to exclude from government across the Middle East, even if that means supporting autocratic and repressive regimes. The intelligence source who leaked the document concluded: "This idea that you're going to transform the Middle East and fundamentally alter its trajectory is not credible."

The date on the report, 26 February, was the very day the President laid out his vision of a domino effect, in which a US invasion of Iraq would be the beginning of a democratic revolution throughout the Middle East. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," Mr Bush said.

The State Department report, by contrast, dismisses the domino theory in its title: Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes.