Inside The Occupation

By Bill Powell with Mark Thompson/Tikrit

General John Abizaid likes to travel on the edge. He is riding in a Black Hawk helicopter as it tears across the skies of central Iraq, skimming treetops and flushing startled sheep out onto the grassy pastures beneath. As always, the general's entourage of three choppers is shadowed by Apache helicopter gunships, hunting for the hunters--the insurgents who may lurk below and would like nothing better than to shoot down another symbol of the American occupation. This one would be a particular prize: as the head of the U.S. military's Central Command, Abizaid is the Pentagon's man in the Middle East, responsible for everything from the hunt for Osama bin Laden to the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan to making sure al-Qaeda is not able to regroup anywhere else in the poor, lawless areas that make up much of the troubled turf he oversees.

But for Abizaid, as for his superiors in Washington, the effort to stabilize Iraq is job No. 1. The general has spent much of the past year trying to prevent the occupation from becoming an unwinnable quagmire--and that was before the prison-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib erupted in all its sordid horror. Now Abizaid and his men are racing against the clock, attempting to turn back the insurgency, soothe Iraqi outrage at the U.S. and bring the country enough security so that Iraqis can begin to take power after June 30, when a U.N.-anointed caretaker government steps in. Abizaid, accompanied by TIME on a mission to Iraq this month, flies low and fast. When he arrives at a U.S. base in Tikrit, he is determined to exhort the troops to keep the faith, at a time when so many Americans are losing theirs. Back home, Americans "see pictures of burning humvees, they see pictures of abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and they see all the negative things that happen," he says, addressing 100 soldiers in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces. "But the positive things that happen day after day--the only people who really know about that are you."

This may seem like an awkward time for Abizaid and the forces he commands to accentuate the positive. By many measures, the U.S. enterprise in Iraq remains a chaotic, costly slog. The prison scandal has plainly made the goal of winning Iraqi hearts and minds remote. Last week's brutal videotaped decapitation of American Nicholas Berg, 26, showed again just how dangerous Iraq remains. Even Donald Rumsfeld, the embattled Defense Secretary, acknowledged at least the possibility that the grand American design for Iraq--a stable democracy at the heart of the autocratic Arab world--might end in failure. "Is it possible it won't work?" he asked rhetorically during testimony before the Senate last week. "Yes."

But for those dealing with the facts on the ground in Iraq--and desperately trying to create new realities--failure is not an option openly acknowledged. With barely a month to go before the occupation officially ends, the scramble to sort out two critical questions--Who will run the country after June 30? And will the U.S. be able to leave Iraq anytime soon?--is close to a sprint. While U.S. troops launched an all-out, high-risk offensive to destroy Shi'ite militia loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr last week, the U.N. envoy responsible for forming a new Iraqi government, Lakhdar Brahimi, huddled with aides and dignitaries in the Republican Palace in Baghdad to plot the shape of Iraq's political future. Bad as the past two months have been, U.S. officials believe that if the military keeps a lid on the insurgency and if Brahimi's plan picks up support, they might still be able to steer Iraq toward democratic elections by January 2005. "It's unrealistic to think that in one year everything is going to be settled," Abizaid told TIME in his low-ceilinged office at Centcom headquarters in Doha, Qatar, after the visit to Iraq. "Yes, there is still violence and still some instability, but ... there is a lot of progress that shouldn't be overlooked."

For the Americans in Iraq, fighting is still the order of the day. Military officials believe their strategy of squeezing al-Sadr and forcing him to hole up in the holy city of Najaf has worked to turn powerful Shi'ites against him. But last week's offensive showed that the military can't wait much longer for al-Sadr's rivals to take matters into their own hands. "Frankly, they're not killing his people as quickly as we'd like," a U.S. officer says. Al-Sadr's ragtag army poses little military challenge--U.S. forces killed scores of pro--al-Sadr militants in the course of the week--but the offensive could still incite popular outrage at the U.S. if al-Sadr draws U.S. forces into bloody street battles that do extensive damage to Shi'ite holy sites. On Friday a fire fight between al-Sadr's forces and U.S. tankers near Najaf's shrine of the Imam Ali left four small holes in the shrine's golden dome. Almost immediately, U.S. officials blamed al-Sadr. Says a senior Army officer: "The approach we're using has kept the majority of Shi'ites on our side."

The Sunni heartland in the middle of the country remains the biggest concern for U.S. commanders, not least because the escalating danger of working there has slowed reconstruction to a near halt. But in Fallujah, the hotbed of the resistance, U.S. officials point to a recent outbreak of sanity. The Marines eased their stranglehold on the city three weeks ago, placed a former general in Saddam's army in charge of security and began joint patrols through the city with local Iraqi forces. So far, the patrols have gone off without major incident. The change in tactics--for weeks the U.S. had been threatening a massive assault on the city--was aimed, senior military sources say, at addressing what they believe was one of the occupation's most significant faults: the severing from the Sunni minority, which dominated Iraq under Saddam, of any sense that it had a stake in Iraq's future. Abizaid told TIME that he's cautiously optimistic the city will remain quiet: "If we can work together cooperatively, then it'll be a win for both of us. If not, then I think there's more trouble ahead for Fallujah."

That's not the only place that could get nastier as the handover approaches. A senior coalition official told TIME that the insurgents are showing more coordination and sophistication than they did just a few months ago. And U.S. commanders fear that the insurgents have set their sights on Baghdad, in hopes of sabotaging the June 30 transfer of power. "You can't be sovereign if you can't control your own capital," says a senior military source. "That's where the action is going to be as we get closer to June 30."

Given that threat, the images of Abu Ghraib could not have emerged at a worse time. When the stories of abuse broke on April 28, Lieut. Colonel Tim Ryan, commander of the so-called Thunderhorse Battalion--the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division--had begun to piece together building projects in the area in and around Abu Ghraib, in western Baghdad. The construction would have employed several hundred local men and therefore was a key part, Ryan says, of his plan for defusing support for the insurgency in the Sunni-dominated area. Now he is opting for offering small-scale projects through tribal sheiks, nurturing his ties with them. Still, the prison-abuse scandal has been a blow to even that strategy. "Every time we want to discuss starting a new project, their agenda is, 'We want to talk about the detainees,''' says Major Scott Kendrick, executive officer of the Thunderhorse Battalion. "We say that [what happened] doesn't represent our ideals. But it's more and more difficult to communicate that."

With the U.S. suffering from what an adviser to the interim Iraqi Governing Council calls a "morality deficit," Iraq's formal political future is almost wholly in the hands of Brahimi, 70, the former Algerian diplomat who is U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special envoy. Since returning to Iraq last month, Brahimi has remained behind heavily cordoned barbed-wire barricades and travels with tight security. But he is "in the thick of it," says his spokesman, Ahmed Fawzi, often meeting with Iraqis and coalition officials until midnight. Aides say that by the end of May, Brahimi, in consultation with Administration officials and a panel of Iraqi judges, hopes to select a President, two Vice Presidents, a Prime Minister and a Cabinet composed of 30 ministries. The most delicate trick will be to ensure that the new government, which Brahimi says will run Iraq from July 1 until elections, reflects the country's fractious religious and ethnic mix.

Once it's named, the caretaker government will have to establish legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqis--something that may be impossible if the U.S. is seen as its midwife. Both Washington and Brahimi are lobbying U.N. Security Council members to pass a new resolution endorsing the government. Yet while the Administration is desperate to take its face off the occupation, it also hopes to direct Iraq's future behind the scenes. Throughout the spring, the U.S. has sprinkled friendly Iraqis throughout key ministries, with the intention of retaining influence on the post--June 30 government, no matter whom Brahimi ends up appointing. That government will not control the country's armed forces and security services. A senior coalition-authority adviser confirmed to TIME last week that the U.S. intends to continue to command Iraq's forces after June 30.

A senior U.N. official says Brahimi "feels he's making progress, but time is very short." There are still plenty of doubts about whether cobbling together a new Iraqi government in such short order will truly make Iraq safe enough to run itself--let alone safe for democracy. But the U.S. has run out of other options. "We are being challenged to do what we say we intend to do, which is transfer responsibility to an interim government," says a U.S. official at the U.N. "I don't see any escaping it." This means that before long, the fate of the country will lie in the hands of those ordinary Iraqis now clamoring for an end to a grinding occupation. Will they cling to the proposed new government as a symbol of their own new legitimacy and independence? Or if the chaos escalates, will they wash their hands entirely of outsiders' designs for their country, even if that accelerates Iraq's descent into violence? That those are the fateful choices now looming is clear to almost everyone. Unfortunately, the outcome is not. --With reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Matthew Cooper/Washington and Paul Quinn-Judge and Vivienne Walt/Baghdad

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Matthew Cooper/Washington and Paul Quinn-Judge and Vivienne Walt/Baghdad