A former head of Iraq's Central Bank predicted on Monday that the spiralling cost of holding down Iraq will compel the United States to look for an early way to pull out of the country.

An exile in the West for the past two decades, Salah Shaikhly also said "democratic forces" in Iraq were on the retreat from religious and fundamentalist groups while political leaders were sowing ethnic division.

"Once the US Congress and public opinion realise the true cost burden of the Iraqi campaigns for the US taxpayer, they will force this and any future administration to quickly look for an honourable exit strategy," Shaikhly said.

There were already signs that US efforts to prepare the ground for this were under way, he said.

In the past, President George W. Bush and his aides have denied they are looking for a way to leave despite the mounting casualties among US troops and the growing cost of the occupation effort.

Shaikhly was speaking at a two-day Geneva conference on the future of Iraq's petroleum sector organised by the British-based CWC Associates Ltd which works to promote investment in emerging markets and especially in the energy sector.

A senior economic official in the 1970s under the ruling Baath Party who left the country when now ousted President Saddam Hussein took full power, Shaikhly said the US invasion and occupation would cost Washington more than $300 billion.

Now running a London-based consultancy on investment in Iraq, he said this burden had to be coupled with the likelihood that oil output and export would not improve significantly before 2010 and with the country's foreign debt of $357 billion.

These figures, Shaikhly argued, did not support the theory held widely in Arab countries that the United States and Britain invaded Iraq in March to seize control of its oil resources because the financial cost could not be recouped.

Leaders of both countries have also rejected this "conspiracy theory" explanation -- voiced also in Asia and Europe -- for their controversial decision to invade.

Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair insist their forces went in to prevent Saddam developing weapons of mass destruction -- which have yet to be found -- and to establish democratic rule in the country.

However, Shaikhly -- who headed the Central Bank in Baghdad from 1968 to 1978 and later served as an assistant secretary- general of the United Nations -- suggested that the occupying forces were failing in the second aim.

"Religious and fundamentalist groups seem to have the upper hand, while the democratic forces in Iraqi society are on the retreat," he said.

Opposition politicians who returned to Iraq and who now run the US-appointed Governing Council, "seem to have brought with them the virus of sectarian and ethnic divides," he said.

The Council and the cabinet were created according to sectarian and ethnic ratios, and there were signs that this concept had become the norm, "creeping into other facets of Iraqi daily life.

"One cannot over-emphasise the pitfalls of continuing with this dangerous practice," Shaikhly said.

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