London, Dec 31, IRNA , President George W Bush’s administration needs to bury the past and reach an agreement with Iran as part of a broader rapprochement to prevent the total collapse of Iraq as a country, a leading British daily said Monday.
Predicting events of 2008, the Financial Times warned that Iraq can no longer be properly considered a unitary state and for practical purposes had already disintegrated, “broken by dictatorship, war, invasion and occupation.”
The best hope was for a weak central government whose primary role is to allocate oil revenue on an agreed basis, the newspaper suggested, saying this would require a broader rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which it believed was possible.
The US, the paper’s chief leader writer David Gardner said, needed to “bury the past and seek a diplomatic grand bargain with Tehran.” Elsewhere in its forecasts for next year, it was expected that Hilary Clinton would be most likely elected as the next US president, “barring a remarkable upset.”
In Russia, the FT suggested that Dmitry Medvedev would win March’s presidential election “by a mile” but that real power will remain in the hands of his predecessor Vladimir Putin, whether or not power is officially transferred to the prime minister.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, it also said, will hang on until at least 2009 and possibly mid-2010 before daring to face the voters in a general election.
The paper also believed that London mayor Ken Livingstone would win a third successive victory in next May’s elections in the British capital and beat off a challenge from the Conservative’s former frontbench spokesman Boris Johnson.
Oil prices in 2008 were expected to finally break the Dlrs 100 per barrel barrier but were likely to end the year lower than at the start.
House prices in the UK will fall, stock markets may drop but the US should avoid tipping over into a recession despite skating along the brink, the daily also predicted.