Senior U.S. military officers have told President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Robert

Gates that the new Iraq strategy could fail unless more civilian agencies step forward quickly to carry out plans for reconstruction and political development, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

The complaints reflect fresh tensions between the Pentagon and the State Department over personnel demands that have fallen most heavily on the military, the report said.

Among particular complaints, the officers cited a request from the office of the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that military personnel temporarily fill more than one-third of 350 new

State Department jobs in Iraq that are to be created under the new strategy.

At a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Gates made it clear that he shared the officers' concerns, and to back up his point, he told senators that Bush himself had addressed his cabinet at the White

House on Monday about the need for civilian agencies to "step up to the task."

At one level, the conflict is a cultural clash between a military that has ordered hundreds of thousands of troops to Iraq in the last four years, and a Foreign Service that offers incentives for civilians to work in war zones but cannot compel diplomats to accept hard assignments like Iraq, the report said.

Mounting tensions between the Pentagon and other departments are in some ways the mirror image of those that roiled the government before the 2003 invasion. Then, State Department officials grumbled that the Pentagon was usurping its role in planning the postwar civilian occupation; today, the military is eager to see others step in, the report said.

Under the new strategy Bush unveiled last month, the military is pushing more than 20,000 additional troops to Baghdad to augment the American military force of about 132,000 already present in Iraq.

Over 3,000 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed since the Iraq war started in March 2003.

Source: Xinhua