US scales down plans for Iraq

The daily said US officials had in the past few months dropped plans to privatise state-owned businesses and backed off efforts to disarm militias under the control of ethnic and political factions.

"The Americans are coming to understand that they cannot change everything they want to change in Iraq," Adel Abdel-Mehdi, a senior leader of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite Muslim political party cooperating with the US-led occupation, told the daily.

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"They need to let the Iraqi people decide the big issues."

The US administrator for Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and his deputies are now focused on forging compromises with Iraqi leaders and combating a persistent insurgency in order to meet a July 1 deadline to transfer sovereignty to a provisional government, the Post said.

"There's no question that many of the big-picture items have been pushed down the list or erased completely," a senior US official involved in Iraq's reconstruction told the daily on condition of anonymity.

"Right now, everyone's attention is focused on doing what we need to do to hand over sovereignty by next summer."

The anti-US insurgency has killed 209 American soldiers since May 1, when US President George W. Bush declared major combat ended in Iraq, according to an AFP count.