Can Iraq Rule Itself?

YURI KOZYREV FOR TIME
Election posters hang all over Baghdad

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So, under what kinds of conditions would they participate? Across the ethnic and political spectrum, Iraqi leaders say the best way for the new government to garner support would be to set a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. It might even help convince rejectionistsnationalistic insurgents as well as disaffected Sunnis like contractor Nasreddinthat the new government is not a puppet of the U.S. Spokesmen for several militant groups have told TIME that a scheduled exit of U.S. troops is an essential condition for any negotiations with the new government.

It isn't just the insurgents who would like to see the U.S. go. "The best way to please the masses, to gain legitimacy and credibility," says al-Dulame, "is to slap down the Americans in a very public way."

Many of the leaders on the Shi'ite slate say a summary eviction of the U.S. would not serve the new government's interests, since Iraqi security forces are in no position to pick up the slack. "When the Americans go will depend on when our own forces are ready and on how the resistance responds after the elections," says al-Mahdi. Still, the Shi'ite leadership remains adamant that it will be Baghdad's call to make. Last fall Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leading candidate on the Shi'ite slate, told TIME that the U.S. would leave when it was asked.

"The decision will be an Iraqi one, not an American one," he said. "And we want this foreign army out of our country immediately. We cannot tolerate this presence on our soil." At this point, many Americans seem willing to call al-Hakim's bluff.

But the Pentagon believes a precipitous U.S. withdrawal would condemn Iraq to a bloodbath wrought by Sunni insurgents against a weak central government that might then be tempted to seek help from Iran.

That said, the U.S. is well aware that the Iraqis will probably demand that the Americans start making plans to leave. In November the CIA's departing station chief in Baghdad sent a cable to Washington predicting that the new government would insist on a schedule for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. A State Department official tells TIME, "We always expected to face a request from the Iraqi government to have a specific timetable."

The U.S.'s position is that a timetable for troop withdrawal is out of the question. That, at any rate, is what top U.S. officials told an influential Sunni clerical group in early January after the imams said they would consider calling off their boycott of the vote in return for a pullout schedule. But the Pentagon is accelerating plans to embed U.S. military advisers with Iraqi security forces in hopes of improving their combat capabilities so that they can take over for U.S. troops. "The most important goal is to get the Iraqis into the fight, not to get our numbers down," says a senior Pentagon official.

"I hope no one has to continue dying for this war, but it is much better that Iraqis die for their country than Americans."

Among some Administration officials, an emerging view is that a deadline set by the new government may galvanize the project to train Iraqis. So far, only about 14,000 members of Iraq's army, special-operations and urban-warfare forces have been trained. The Pentagon says it needs more than 32,000. "A timetable may be our best ally," says a State Department official. "It may actually help us get the job done right and get it done fast." And neighboring countries might be more willing to help an independent Iraq with measures like the training of security forces and reconstruction. "There may be a lot of appeal for countries to get on board with something like this because they'd be making commitments not to us but to Iraq," says the official, adding that any call for withdrawal "has to be realisticnot just pulling out."

It says something about the collapse of American illusions in Iraq that a deal along those lines with an elected government might be the closest the U.S. can get to declaring victory and heading home. For Iraqis like Karim al-Saadi, the government that is born on Jan. 30 will be judged by how it succeeds "with important things." He defines them as "security, jobs ... and getting the Americans out of our country." If nothing else, those are goals for the new government that all Iraqis can agree on.