Washington ? The Bush administration is struggling to counter growing sentiment — among U.S. lawmakers, Iraqis and even some of its own officials — that the occupation of Iraq is verging on failure, forcing a top Pentagon official Tuesday to concede serious mistakes over the past year.

Under tough questioning from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the administration’s intellectual architect of the Iraq intervention, admitted miscalculating that Iraqis would tolerate a long-term occupation. A central flaw in planning, he added, was the premise that U.S. forces would be engaged in creating a peace, not fighting a war after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

“We had a plan that anticipated, I think, that we could proceed with an occupation regime for much longer than it turned out the Iraqis would have patience for. We had a plan that assumed we’d have basically more stable security conditions than we’ve encountered,” Wolfowitz told the senators.

The testy hearing reflected growing anxieties with only six weeks left before the handover of political power to Iraqis. The United States is now so deeply immersed in damage control — combating security problems and recriminations from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and making a third attempt at crafting an interim government in Baghdad — that lawmakers and others say Iraq faces greater uncertainty about the future than when the occupation began with great expectations a year ago.

“There are a lot of people across this country who are very, very worried about how this is progressing, what the endgame is, whether or not we are going to achieve even a part of our goals here — and the growing fear that we may in fact have in some ways a worse situation if we’re not careful at the end of all this,” warned Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., echoing comments of several committee members.

President Bush on Tuesday pledged to stick with the planned June 30 transfer of power in Iraq.

Funding canceled

Also Tuesday, Wolfowitz said the Pentagon had decided to stop funding the Iraqi National Congress, the group led by Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi exile once favored by senior Bush administration officials to lead postwar Iraq.

For months, congressional critics had complained about the $340,000 a month that the Pentagon has been paying the INC, cash that continued to flow even after U.S. intelligence agencies found that prewar intelligence provided by the INC about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction was at times misleading, inflated or even fabricated.

Wolfowitz said that “a decision that was made in light of the process of transferring sovereignty to the Iraqi people. We felt it was no longer appropriate for us to continue funding in that fashion.”