On March 21, the day after the first bombs fell on Baghdad, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld set out eight US war objectives, the priority being the end of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Other aims were to: locate and destroy weapons of mass destruction; hunt down and capture terrorists who may be hiding out in Iraq; gather intelligence on networks dealing in terror or weapons of mass destruction; replace sanctions on Iraq with humanitarian aid; secure oil fields; and assure the swift transition to a representative Iraqi government.

Some of the goals have been partly or completely reached.

Saddam Hussein's regime fell on Wednesday.

Earlier in the month, US troops destroyed in Iraqi Kurdistan several camps of the group Ansar Al-Islam, which Washington suspects of having ties to al-Qaeda's terror network.

Meanwhile, all of the oil wells in southern Iraq have been secured and 800 out of 1,000 inspected, according to the US Central Command.

In the north, Kurdish officials said Kurdish and US forces controlled oil wells around the city of Kirkuk.

US-led forces have yet to discover the chemical and biological arms US President George W. Bush said were grounds for the invasion, which has not changed any minds at the White House. Baghdad has always denied possessing such banned weapons.

The United States has "high confidence" that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and that US-led forces will find such banned weapons, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Thursday.

"We have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction -- that is what this war was about, and is about -- and we have high confidence it will be found," he told reporters.

There are "people who may have knowledge about it, who want to provide that knowledge to the United States or to coalition allies so that evidence of weapons of mass destruction can indeed be unearthed or found," he said.

Humanitarian aid is being organized amid the prevailing disarray.

But of all the goals identified by Washington, the toughest remains laying the groundwork for a representative Iraqi government once the transition period under US and British supervision is over.

"It's something that will take years and will take a collective effort of many governments," said Jon Wolfsthal, of the Carnegie Foundation. "It cannot be effectively generated by the US government alone."

"You really are starting from scratch in creating a representative government.

"The US and others countries are very concerned about Iraq breaking apart, because you have no basis for a civil society, for the rule of law, all the basic building blocks have to be created out of thin air," Wolfsthal said.

"There's never been a doubt that the United States would win the war, that it would win it quickly and that, if necessary, would win it alone. Winning the peace is less certain. And winning the peace on our own is even less certain," said former US ambassador James Dobbins, at a discussion at the Brookings Insitution.

"That doesn't mean that we govern Iraq for five years, but it does mean that we stick around long enough to ensure that the reforms we put in place stay in place," Dobbins said, using Somalia and in Haiti as examples.

"In neither case did any of the reforms that we applied take."

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