'Differences within Iraqi society - a major challenge'

NEW YORK: American Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker has said that the main challenge in Iraq is to remove the "corrosion" that has been created in the Iraqi society by sectarian violence.

One of the major problems ... is the corrosion that sectarian violence has created and the damage it's done to how people relate to one another," Crocker told Newsweek in an interview to be published in its upcoming issue.

Crocker has an intimate knowledge of Iraq and is not surprised by the decline. In 2002, he had helped compile a six-page State Department memo warning that an invasion of Iraq could set off bloodshed between Sunnis and Shiites. Its title was "The Perfect Storm", the new magazine report says.

The ambassador and his military counterpart Gen. David Petraeus are in Iraq now to salvage a mission that seems increasingly hopeless, the report says.

"My checkered past has taught me a few things. One of them is respect for other people's reality. Iraq has its own reality, its own institutions, its own way of doing things, certainly its own problems that will have to be solved in Iraqi terms. Understanding why they approach things as they do is pretty important," he said.

The idea, Crocker said, is "to reduce the number of people you've got to fight to an absolute minimum" by sorting out the "reconcilables" from the "irreconcilables."

Determining which is which will mostly be left to the Iraqi government, he said.