If At First You Don't Succeed...

By Michael Elliott

It's hard to have an afternoon's uninterrupted fun when you are the National Security Adviser. On Nov. 9, Condoleezza Rice, a passionate football fan, was at FedEx Field outside Washington, watching the Redskins play the Seattle Seahawks, when she got a call from L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the American proconsul in Iraq. For the better part of two weeks, Bremer and Rice had been discussing how to speed the transfer of power to Iraqis. Both agreed that the matter now required face time with Administration principals in Washington. When the conversation resumed the next day, it took just a quick look at calendars--President Bush was off to London for a state visit then to Texas for Thanksgiving, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was about to leave for Asia--for everyone to recognize that Bremer should get back to Washington, fast.

Together with Robert Blackwill, a veteran diplomat who is Rice's point man on Iraq and had been visiting Baghdad, Bremer flew to Washington. So urgent was his trip that he blew off a meeting with Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller, whose troops make up the third largest contingent in the occupying force in Iraq. The two days of meetings in Washington that followed turned out to be fateful. Although Bremer was not directly blamed for the occupation's troubles in Iraq, it was plain that his halo had slipped. The message that Bush gave his fellow gym rat last week, says a senior official, can be reduced to five words: "Let's get on with it." "It" turns out to be a thorough reworking of Bremer's plan to turn power over to the Iraqis.

At a press conference in Baghdad on Saturday, Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader who holds the rotating presidency of the Iraqi Governing Council, announced the new scheme. In effect, Bremer has junked the plan for Iraqi self-rule that he unveiled last summer. Under the original proposal, the council, made up of Iraqi notables appointed by the U.S., was to propose how a constitution might be drafted by December. After the document was written, it would be ratified in a referendum, and only then would a sovereign Iraqi government be elected. The whole process could have taken up to four years. In recent weeks, however, it had become plain that the council would not meet the December deadline, which had been enshrined in a U.N. Security Council resolution. "They got things built into an impasse. They basically said to us, 'Help us get out of this,'" Bremer told TIME last week. "We understood the desire for them to have sovereignty more quickly, and we wanted them to have sovereignty. We had to find a way forward."

Under the new plan, the Governing Council will be wound up at the end of May. A national assembly will be elected from Iraq's provinces--the details on how that will happen are still murky--and the assembly will form an executive council. At that time the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which Bremer heads, will dissolve, and sovereignty will be devolved to a provisional Iraqi government. A constitution will follow. At the same time the Administration is preparing to accelerate the transfer of political power to Iraqis, it is also looking for ways to augment Iraqi military capabilities. Sources tell TIME that the Administration is rethinking its opposition to bringing back senior Iraqi army officers who served under Saddam Hussein.

The change in plan is more than a minor course correction. It is an admission by the Administration that the basis of its policies since the spring has crumbled. Bremer's initial plan for transferring power to Iraqis had seven points, which should have been a warning. Any seven-step program is almost by definition a leisurely one. The Administration hoped to take the process of nation building slowly, first building up the institutions of civil society--courts, a free press, a constitution, habits of consensus rather than confrontation. Only after the invisible infrastructure of a modern state had been established would Iraq move to elections for a government and sovereignty. But that idea involved one fatal conceit: that the clock would move at a speed of the Administration's choosing. Dominique de Villepin, the French Foreign Minister, said acidly last week, "The American representatives on the ground continue to use the language of all the world's occupation regimes--'Just a little more time.'"

Time is what the Administration now knows it does not have. Without some swift assumption of real power by Iraqis, local resentment of coalition forces will only grow. As a leaked report from the CIA station chief in Baghdad details, the number, intensity and organizational sophistication of attacks on coalition forces are all on the increase. Last week 19 Italians and 13 Iraqis were killed when a car bomb blew up an Italian base in Nasiriyah. Seven Americans were killed in six attacks, and at least another 17 died when two U.S. helicopters crashed in midair as one apparently dodged shooting from the ground.

To address the security challenge, the U.S. has gone back to a war footing. Coalition forces launched an offensive, code-named Operation Iron Hammer, that included attacks from helicopter gunships on supposed safe houses and arms dumps used by the opposition. In a further sign that the U.S. means business, General John Abizaid, head of Central Command, and some 200 of his war planners will soon move from Tampa, Fla., to the forward command position in Qatar that they occupied during last spring's battle to topple Saddam.

The Administration now knows that coalition forces alone cannot bring peace to Iraq. As the CIA report said--and the Pentagon acknowledges--Iraqis will always be better than the Americans at ferreting out intelligence about insurgents. That helps explain why many in Washington privately say they regret Bremer's decision to disband the Iraqi army on May 23. U.S. officials are urgently searching for potential leaders of a new Iraqi army. An Arab businessman in close touch with the U.S. government tells TIME that one commander who has attracted attention is Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai, a Sunni Muslim who was Saddam's Minister of Defense. Though Hashim was on the U.S.'s most-wanted list, this source says he was in contact with the U.S. before the war and was consulted by American officials after he was taken into custody in Mosul. A former CIA official says Hashim is "a great guy, basically an officer's officer." He adds that Hashim would "bring a real sense of empowerment" to Iraqis who never left the country and now feel overshadowed by formerly exiled figures close to Washington. But among Iraqi exiles, Hashim remains a hated figure. If he was appointed head of the army, says one former intelligence officer who has returned from abroad, "we would kill him."

The deteriorating security situation is only half the Administration's problem. Long before last week's policy change, it had become evident that the Governing Council has not gelled into a body that can be presented--to Iraqis or a skeptical world--as the nucleus of Iraqi self-rule. The council's performance has been lackluster. At times in the past four months, half its members have been outside the country. Some continue to have primary homes where they lived in exile, and few have bothered to travel around Iraq to build support for the body's authority. On the Iraqi street, the council has never garnered much support. Mohammed Thabit Rifat, an accountant in the Ministry of Finance, reflects a common perception among Iraqis that the council is dominated by exiles who enjoyed life abroad while everyone else suffered under Saddam. "They lived outside the country in luxury," he says, "and came here without knowledge of the traditions and habits of the country."

Even those who for professional reasons might be expected to support the council often knock it. "The Governing Council is composed of prima donnas," says an official of the CPA. Qubad Talabani, Jalal Talabani's son and chief political adviser, bluntly describes the organization as "a large body that is unable to make decisions. Everything gets clogged up in hours-long debates. It's paralysis." Kanan Makiya, a Brandeis University professor who is on the council's constitutional committee, says, "We've been going around and around in circles. We have lost three months that we could have spent in a drafting committee."

To be fair to the council, its poor performance is not all its fault. The CPA has micromanaged what the Iraqis can decide and which Iraqis can be trusted. "The problem with Americans," says a U.S. official, "is that we are control freaks. We need to let them make their own mistakes. It's their country. We are either about the business of being a valuable, competent adviser, or we are occupiers."

In truth, Bremer's initial plan was always dicey. Here's why: Shi'ite Muslims make up a majority in Iraq (60%), although under Saddam--a Sunni--they never had the power their numbers warranted. The Governing Council too has a Shi'ite majority. In the summer Ayatullah Ali Hussein al-Sistani issued a fatwa saying that any body drafting a constitution had to be elected, not appointed by the council. Al-Sistani, though Iranian by birth, is the most senior Shi'ite religious leader in Iraq. There was no chance that the council would openly oppose his will, and--because his tolerance of the occupation acts as a buffer between coalition forces and potential unrest among the Shi'ites--no chance that the CPA would force the council to do so. "Al-Sistani," says Flynt Leverett, a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, "is seen as apolitical, so he carries a lot of respect."

But bowing to political realities on the council won't necessarily help Washington achieve its larger goals. For the idealists in the Administration, one purpose of the adventure in Iraq was to create in the Middle East a democratic, pluralistic state with protections for the rights of minorities and women. But an Iraqi constitution written by an elected body in all likelihood means a constitution written by the Shi'ite majority. That runs the risk that neither the Sunnis nor the Kurds--both of whom want their interests protected--will be content with it. And though there is little appetite among Iraqi Shi'ites for an Iranian-style constitutional theocracy, there is a growing recognition that the new Iraq will look more like a confessional state than many in the Administration had hoped. "Islam's going to be in [the constitution], no matter what," says a CPA OFFICIAL. Says an adviser to the Administration: "We don't have to make Iraq look like the U.S. If we get [a stable country] that's more Islamic than we would like, that's O.K."

Even that goal will be at risk if the security situation does not improve. In a guerrilla war, the sort of heavy-duty offensive launched last week can quickly backfire. "We risk looking really stupid if we say that we're going to get really tough but we can't, and if those measures only push those Iraqis sitting on the fence over to the other side," says former Marine Lieut. Colonel Dale Davis, who served in the Middle East and North Africa. "You don't win hearts and minds by blowing up somebody's house."

That's if you can find the house in the first place. The U.S. armed forces' awesome technology is of limited use in a low-intensity war, in which guerrillas can attack at a time and place of their choosing. Already the Pentagon has withdrawn space-age systems like the Global Hawk high-flying drones from the conflict, although they could conceivably be used to stop foreign fighters sneaking into Iraq. "Too much of our stuff is too complicated for what is happening in Iraq now," says an Army colonel. "All the smart bombs are worth nothing if you don't know where to drop them." What's needed is intimate knowledge of neighborhoods where the insurgents gather. And that's something the U.S. and its coalition allies lack. "The U.S. Army does not have a fraction of the linguists required to operate in the Central Command's area of responsibility," says a report from the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kans.

In Washington the Administration is trying to put the best face on things. True, the Japanese have delayed the deployment of their promised force to Iraq, and the South Koreans have capped the number they plan to send, but--as always--all will be well. The growing number of Iraqi security forces--now, according to Rumsfeld, 131,000 strong--will augment the troops of those members of the coalition who still have a stomach for the fight. It is likely, however, that there will be plenty of U.S. forces in Iraq for some time. A Pentagon official in Iraq says the plan is to eventually take all U.S. soldiers in Iraq off the street and into their bases, letting Iraqis conduct most routine patrols. But, he adds, "America will probably have bases here for 10 to 12 years." Bremer assumes that the provisional government will want U.S. forces to help stabilize the country after next summer, and Talabani concurs--up to a point. "If we need [U.S. troops], we shall ask them to stay," he told TIME last week. "If not, we will respectfully say, 'Bye-bye, dear friends.'"

One bright note: the fighting within the Administration over Iraq policy may be ending. There are still some in the Pentagon who would like to see Iraq run by their longtime ally Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the Governing Council and the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, even though he clearly has little political support there. But the Pentagon, which has called the shots for a year, is finally giving in to reality. Strengthened by the addition of Blackwill, a tough operator with a nice trifecta on his resume--he worked for the President's dad, mentored Rice when she was a junior staffer at the National Security Council and has been a close friend of Bremer's for 30 years--the White House may finally be getting everyone in Washington to pull in the same direction.

Still, neat lines of accountability do not guarantee the success of so audacious an enterprise as the American determination to remake Iraq. In any war, older and elemental loyalties, beliefs and suspicions can wreck even carefully laid plans. In a small town west of Ramadi last week, dozens of Iraqis milled around the shell of a house that had been wrecked a week before by missiles from a U.S. helicopter gunship, killing six resistance fighters. The visitors were there because they had heard--and believed--the rumors. The place, they said, smelled not of death but of sweet perfume; the bloodstains on the wall had not turned a rusty black but had stayed deep red. These miracles, said the people in the crowd, were acts of Allah.

"We don't want Saddam. We don't want the Americans," said Hamid Thabit, who drove 15 miles to the house many times last week. "We want someone who will look after the Iraqi people." Asked if he had anyone in mind, he replied, "No. There is no one now." Nearby, a young history student who had driven three hours to the site placed bits of rubble in a small plastic bag. "I will put it in my home," the student said. "It is holy." --Reported by Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper, Michael Duffy, Mark Thompson, Douglas Waller and Adam Zagorin/Washington; Brian Bennett/Ramadi; Hassan Fattah, Romesh Ratnesar and Vivienne Walt/Baghdad; and James Graff/Paris

With reporting by Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper, Michael Duffy, Mark Thompson, Douglas Waller and Adam Zagorin/Washington; Brian Bennett/Ramadi; Hassan Fattah, Romesh Ratnesar and Vivienne Walt/Baghdad; and James Graff/Paris