Taking Back The Streets

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For the time being, Iraq's leaders will have to rely largely on coalition troops to carry out counterinsurgency raids and protect police stations and other facilities that are under constant threat of attack. But now, instead of running their own provocative raids, U.S. troops are supposed to draw back inside their bases and play a supporting role. They have been directed to invent partnership arrangements with local forces so that security operations will be conducted jointly by Iraqi and U.S. commanders.

Nevertheless, men like Saleh and al-Rubaie are convinced that they can put enough of an Iraqi cast on national security to make a difference. Sending even a few Iraqi officers to the front lines, they say, could begin to change the popular perception that Iraq is caught in the cross-fire of Washington's own war on terrorism. Those who characterize the bomb blasts and gun battles as resistance to foreign occupation, says Saleh, "will lose credibility."

His government is racing against time — it has just seven months before scheduled elections to convince ordinary citizens that the anti-jihad fight is theirs. "We have to do that," says Saleh. "Convince Iraqis that this should be a war of the government and people against the terrorists." And accomplish what the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) could not. According to the New York Times, a senior CPA official who returned last week to Washington confesses that in the past 15 months, U.S. intelligence hasn't cracked the insurgency's command and control or eroded its strength. "Our intelligence on this stuff," the source said, "was never as good as it should be." Al-Rubaie says this is the one area where his people have an edge: "This is our country. We know every single alleyway." That's the basis on which al-Shahwani will try to build a successful counterinsurgency — and a truly sovereign nation.