WASHINGTON, April 8 (Xinhua) -- Ali A Allawi, senior adviser to the prime minister of Iraq and once served as Iraq's trade, defense and finance minister at different times, blasted U.S. failures in Iraq in his 500-page book "The Occupation of Iraq," the AP reported Sunday.

    "The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order," Allawi concluded in the book published by Yale University Press.

    Allawi asserted that the United States committed blunders such as disbanding Iraq's army and purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein's Baath party, with little consultation with the Iraqis.

    On U.S. reconstruction failures -- in electricity, health care and other areas documented by Washington's own auditors -- Allawi wrote that the Americans' "insipid retelling of `success' stories "merely hid "the huge black hole that lay underneath," the report said.

    The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country's four-year ordeal, the report said.

    The United States launched the Iraq war and toppled the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003 on the grounds that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and ties with al Qaeda terror network. However, none of these has been proved existent. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in the violence after the Iraq war.