The administration of US President George W. Bush displayed "negligence" in failing to plan for the chaos sweeping post-war Iraq, a prominent French think tank said in its just-released annual report.
"How can the American administration's negligence in terms of preparing for the post-war period be explained?" wrote the director of the Paris-based French Institute for International Relations (IFRI), Thierry de Montbrial.
"In retrospect, the extent of the lack of preparation is astounding," he noted in the foreword to "Ramses", a wide-ranging report that includes a large section about the aftermath of last year's US-led invasion of Iraq.
"If peace had been quickly established and if, in keeping with 'neo-conservative' thinking, a model democracy has rapidly taken the place of a dictatorship, only the disgruntled and the partisan would have dwelled on the validity of previous justifications" for war, de Montbrial said, referring to the ongoing debate over US claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
"But the neo-conservatives and their followers in Washington and London made a huge mistake."
He concluded that fulfilling the scenario outlined in UN resolutions on Iraq, which call for general elections by January 2005 and a constitutionally elected government by the end of 2005, would be "an extraordinary feat".
But de Montbrial said the transatlantic row over the war that toppled Saddam Hussein had simmered down.
"Transatlantic relations were not shattered," he wrote. "A new transatlantic balance seems established, if not yet entirely stable."
"For the most part, the United States once again recognises the need, of at least the usefulness, of a relatively strong and united Europe," he added.
France staunchly opposed the US-led war in Iraq.