Washington ? Planning for the Iraq war was hobbled by tensions between Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and military planners over the staying power of Saddam Hussein’s regime, by leaks of highly classified war plans and by little attention to the war’s aftermath, according to a new insider account.

A top intelligence analyst at the U.S. military’s Central Command writes that near-constant demands from Rumsfeld and his aides for new versions of the war plan using fewer American troops wasted time and diverted attention from fleshing out a blueprint for the March 2003 invasion.

Civilians in Washington, convinced that Saddam’s regime would topple easily, “injected numerous ideas into the dialogue, many of which were amateurish and unrealistic,” wrote the analyst, Gregory Hooker.

Many of those ideas were discarded, but the conflicting approaches never were resolved before the invasion, he says.

Hooker’s account was published this week by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The cover of the study identifies Hooker as CENTCOM’s senior intelligence analyst for Iraq. He has done several stints in the country, including as a U.N. weapons inspector in the 1990s.

Hooker’s account echoes other assessments of the run-up to the war in Iraq, but it’s one of the first on-the-record accounts by someone in his position as a military intelligence analyst, and comes amid renewed debate over Iraq’s future.

In a statement in response to Knight Ridder’s inquiries, Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said: “These are old, tired allegations that have been previously addressed over the past two years.”

Then-CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks “and his CENTCOM team developed a war plan for Iraq – a plan that was careful and detailed with scope for daring adjustments and improvisation. It was a plan that reflected the essence of our defense strategy that recognized that our intelligence is never perfect.”

Central Command had no comment on the study, despite several calls and e-mails.

President Bush, in a speech Wednesday night, made a rare acknowledgment that preparations for postwar Iraq were lacking.

“You know, one of the lessons we learned from our experience in Iraq is that, while military personnel can be rapidly deployed anywhere in the world, the same is not true of U.S. government civilians,” Bush said.