Quotes of the Day

There's rarely a day in Iraq when something doesn't blow up. Take last week. First there were the suicide bombs that shattered the holiest day in the Shi'ite Muslim calendar with profane carnage. As devout worshippers crowded the sect's most sacred shrines in Karbala and Baghdad, a succession of explosions ripped through the crowds flogging themselves in ritual guilt for the murder 14 centuries ago of revered leader Imam Hussein. Suddenly the death and blood were made more terribly real, as 181 perished and 571 fell injured.

Panicked pilgrims stampeded for cover, and a guard from the religious militia providing security at Karbala's Abbas shrine screamed out: "Why, why, why, why this?" While outraged Shi'ites looked for someone to blame—Sunni Muslims, foreign terrorists, the U.S.—the intention seemed evident: to stir up civil war among Iraq's simmering factions.

On Friday came another bombshell, this one political but no less devastating. At 4 p.m., inside the Baghdad Convention Center, in the heart of the U.S. occupation compound, 25 blue-and-gold pens sat on a table waiting for the 25 members of the Iraqi Governing Council to sign the historic interim constitution that they had unanimously approved the previous Monday under the forceful prodding of American proconsul L. Paul Bremer. They never appeared. Iraq's leading Shi'ite cleric, the Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, whose word is law among his millions of followers, had rejected two clauses in the document. As a result, five Shi'ite members of the council, including Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi, refused to ratify the basic law that is to govern Iraq when the U.S. hands over sovereignty on June 30. Bremer and the council struggled through the weekend to repair the damage, but no matter how they resolve the impasse, the disintegration of Friday's ceremonial show of unity did not bode well for the future governing of Iraq.

Two issues—Iraq's security and its sovereignty—form the linchpin of Washington's effort to carry out a successful exit strategy. President George W. Bush has bet the U.S. can get a handle on both issues by the end of June. If the U.S. can pull it off— the country stabilizes as violence diminishes and made-in-Iraq political institutions take hold—Bush can finally claim a victory for the war he made. But if Iraq come June looks like Iraq last week, the U.S.—and Bush—will have no graceful way out.

As the U.S. tries to wind down the occupation, it is caught in a confounding bind. Nearly everyone wants the Americans out, but few can imagine a viable Iraq without them. Bush, for reasons of principle as well as electoral politics, wants Iraq to rule itself but cannot look as if he's cutting and running. In fact, June 30 will mark a symbolic rather than an actual change in the U.S. role; at least 100,000 U.S. troops will remain on the ground, and the biggest U.S. embassy in the world, with more than 3,000 people taking over Bremer's civilian chores, will open its doors.

Bush set the date last November, when the growing number of body bags bearing home dead U.S. troops drove the Administration to rethink its deliberate, step-by-step timeline for reconstructing Iraq. Iraqis, the U.N. and reluctant peacekeeping nations were also clamoring to bring the occupation to a rapid end. So the Administration rewrote the political timetable to speed up the process of restoring national authority to the Iraqis and settled on the June deadline as a reasonable date—some say chosen mainly with an eye on U.S. elections—for a handover. Bush had said, "We're not leaving until the job is done, pure and simple." Now the Administration was pledging that the job could be if not quite done then at least substantially under way by mid-2004.

Much has changed concerning Iraq in the weeks since—except that date. Once the Administration made the promise, it felt it couldn't back out. But Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority is having a tough time controlling the process, seemingly being swept downstream by the timetable rather than steering the process into port. Two plans for organizing an interim Iraqi government have come undone, and there is no new one yet. "If this were computer software," says a senior U.S. intelligence officer, "we'd be on version 3-point-something by now." Military commanders on the ground predict that bloody attacks, which now target Iraqis more than Americans, will surge as dissidents try to thwart Bush's progress. And everyone in Iraq and abroad will continue to hold the U.S. responsible for whatever happens.

Who Can Stop the Violence?
Without security, talk of democracy is academic. "If we can't stop people from being shot downtown, it's all just words," says Lieut. Colonel Steve Russell of the 1-22 Infantry Battalion, 4th Infantry Division's 1st Brigade based in Tikrit. By one measure, at least, security has improved: fewer U.S. troops are dying, at least for now. But other statistics are worrisome. By choosing symbolic moments for maximum psychological impact, suicide bombers and insurgent gunmen have been exacting high tolls from every segment of Iraq's combustible society. Last Tuesday was the deadliest day for Shi'ites since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. It followed February bombings that killed more than 100 Kurds celebrating the Muslim feast of 'Id al-Adha. And the relentless parade of assaults on Iraqi police and other security forces who are supposed to take over safeguarding the nation has caused more than 600 deaths since the beginning of the U.S.-led occupation.

U.S. officials have sought to lay the blame for the bloodshed on foreign terrorists. They point to a call for instigating civil strife that was contained in an intercepted letter allegedly written by Jordanian terrorist chieftain Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. Said Bremer: "We know they did this as part of an effort to promote sectarian violence among Muslims ... because they believe that is the only way to stop Iraq's march toward the democracy terrorists fear." In the aftermath of Tuesday's carnage, Iraqi leaders of all stripes were quick to urge their constituents not to turn on ethnic or religious rivals. But U.S. Army General John Abizaid, the Pentagon commander responsible for Iraq, warned that "civil war is possible" if the violence escalates and conceded that Iraq's fledgling homegrown security forces remain "weak spots." Still, he said, there "is a much greater chance" that Iraq will emerge as "a stable and modern state."

That's not much comfort, though, to Iraqi citizens, who are increasingly worried that the June 30 handover will consign them to chaos. No one likes having U.S. troops on the ground, but almost everyone involved views their presence as necessary for months, if not years, to come. "If you go anywhere in Iraq," says a senior U.S. military official in Baghdad, "Iraqis who hate the occupation say they don't want U.S. forces to leave." Even Shi'ite leader Ayatullah Sistani has intimated that U.S. troops are still needed to stabilize the country.

In fact, while the size of the U.S. presence will shrink somewhat, from 120,000 to around 105,000, the U.S. military is hardly withdrawing. But the posture of U.S. troops in the country is a subject of debate. Critics say the Pentagon is pulling its military back too far in self-defense, leaving operating room for the insurgents. That seemed to be the view of the furious Shi'ites who pelted U.S. troops with shoes, bottles, metal pipes and stones when they showed up to help bomb victims last week.

Administration backers say U.S. commanders have wisely absorbed the lesson of British colonial rule that a heavy military presence in the streets is an irritant, not a reassurance. But the U.S. has also been moving its forces out of the cities into walled-off garrisons to reduce American casualties. Now in the midst of the largest troop rotation since World War II, the Pentagon is replacing seasoned Army combat divisions, in part, with Marines and a sizable corps of reserve and National Guard units (they will make up nearly 40% of the post-June force) unfamiliar with the country, lacking in hands-on experience and trained to operate quite differently. In January before the House Armed Services Committee, Marine Corps Commandant General Michael Hagee said his incoming troops have been studying how the Los Angeles police department patrols gangland neighborhoods. They plan to be less intrusive, eschewing tank raids in favor of foot patrols, cultivating goodwill rather than taking the fight to the enemy. "There is a time for the iron fist and a time for the velvet glove," says Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of U.S. military operations in Iraq. Retired General Anthony Zinni, who headed the U.S. Central Command from 1997 to 2000, says the garrison strategy is "good because it drives down U.S. casualties, but it's bad because it means you're throwing everything onto an Iraqi security force that clearly is not prepared to take it on. You're going to see them pay a hell of a price." Officers in the new Iraqi security corps say the occupation is at a critical phase where the U.S. needs to ease up. "If they do not," says General Abdullah Hussein Jabara, who works with Iraq's security forces, "the bad feelings will continue to grow."

But some officers privately call these velvet-glove aspirations naive. When U.S. troops are holed up in garrisons on the outskirts of cities and towns, says New York University law professor Noah Feldman, who has advised the Administration on Iraq, "they have a tendency to look like wimps." That's a perception the insurgents are certain to put to the test. Lieut. Colonel Russell says "these people respect strength." His unit employed some of the most controversial tactics the occupation has seen: mass detentions, firing on suspected guerrilla positions amid civilians, demolishing houses, even ringing a troublesome village with barbed wire to make all residents pass through a single military checkpoint when they came or went. "We were trying to solve a problem," says Russell. "We didn't really care what the reaction would be. They hate our guts. There wasn't any support to erode." Those methods, he says, "worked. We'll go home victors." But whether Russell's rough stuff or gentler handling can tame the country in the long run has yet to be proved.

Who Controls the Guns?
As U.S. troops have stepped back, Shi'ite and Kurd political parties are relying on their own armed militias to step in. Especially after Tuesday's bloodbath, no one feels safe enough to disarm. Gun-toting Shi'ite militiamen clad in black flooded the bomb-scarred neighborhoods of Karbala and Baghdad, setting up checkpoints and clearing the streets. Thousands of Shi'ites are under arms, divided into two major groups. One, the Jaish al-Mahdi, is aligned with the firebrand radical Muqtada al-Sadr and posts its secretive fighters at his Baghdad strongholds. "Every day people are coming in to volunteer," Sheik Rada al-Zubeidy, who runs one of al-Sadr's branch offices, told TIME last week. An even larger militia called the Badr Organization reports to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Shi'ite's major political party. These fighters conducted anti-Saddam guerrilla operations from bases in Iran for years and have emerged to protect holy places and run security across much of central and southern Iraq. In the north, the Kurdish peshmerga, a 50,000-man paramilitary force that has operated freely in its largely autonomous zone since 1991, intends to remain an active regional guard.

Fearing the militias could turn to political intimidation as the rivalry for political supremacy heats up, the U.S. wants them disarmed. But U.S. occupation commanders have never tried to do so by force. In fact, the U.S. has needed the militias: the peshmerga not only effectively police the north but also provide critical intelligence about infiltrators in the border areas. In the south, the Shi'ite militias have controlled restive communities that have grown disaffected with the occupation. By last week, Bremer thought he had coaxed council members to accept a constitutional pledge to blend their militias into the national security force, though the details and timing for disbanding them were among key issues left unsettled.

But disarming the militias while violence flourishes will be a dicey proposition. The Shi'ites say they deserve the same dispensation to protect themselves as the Kurds. The Kurds feel they have had a tacit understanding, now acknowledged in the transition charter, that the peshmerga would be allowed to keep their arms. Even if others disagree, the Kurd militia does not plan to give up its weapons. "The peshmerga were on the right side of the fence" against Saddam and fought side by side with the Americans, says Qubad Talabani, son and aide to top Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani. "There has to be a reward for this, and disbanding them is not a reward."

Who Will Rule Iraq?
Late last Thursday night, a tired but content Bremer was proudly telling TIME of the occupation's first solid political accomplishment in 11 months. Three days of tense marathon negotiations in the Iraqi Governing Council had culminated in unanimous approval of a surprisingly liberal draft constitution just before the dawn call to prayers on March 1. Bremer praised the much maligned council for taking a "wonderful" step toward democracy. In a triumphant news conference that morning, Shi'ite council member Muwaffaq al-Rubaie called it "a historic day in the long march toward building a new Iraq."

Agreement had been reached, though, by postponing resolution of contentious issues such as the fate of the militias, the extent of federalism linking Iraq's three main groups into a single nation and the role of Islam in the new state. Council members ultimately found it less difficult to adopt an unprecedented Western-style bill of rights—guaranteeing freedom of speech, religion, privacy and assembly, and an independent judiciary—than to decide who gets to take power next. But Bremer was full of confidence that the question of how a new government will be formed could be thrashed out in an "annex" within two months.

The devastating bombs last Tuesday changed everything, unraveling the precarious council unity and threatening to stall the political process altogether. A Sunni council member said the attacks had totally altered "sensitivities." First the constitution-signing ceremony was put off for three days of mourning. Then on Friday evening, as a sextet from the National Symphony Orchestra tuned up the national anthem and accompanied children from Baghdad's School of Music and Ballet, the landmark agreement fell apart. For the third time since November, the powerful Ayatullah Sistani spoiled Washington's plans. Each time his purpose seemed to be to ensure that the Shi'ites would emerge as Iraq's dominant leaders.

Ayatullah Sistani first insisted on a speeded-up timetable for elections. Then in December he brushed aside Bremer's scheme to choose interim rulers through a complicated U.S.-run caucus system and demanded immediate elections. Shi'ites, constituting 60% of the population, expect to dominate any vote. After rugged haggling that brought in the U.N. as an intermediary, the U.S. agreed that elections projected for late 2005 would be pushed forward to the end of 2004.

Ayatullah Sistani's last-minute objections focused on two clauses in the basic law that give the Kurds what he apparently considers an unreasonable amount of autonomy and power. But those "technical" disputes may have opened up a fundamental struggle for political supremacy. Five of the council's 13 Shi'ite members simply failed to appear for a lunch meeting to ratify the document, and it took hours of cajoling to persuade them even to attend emergency talks well after the public ceremony should have begun. Prominent among the refuseniks was Chalabi, head of the exile Iraqi National Congress and the Bush Administration's closest ally on the council.

When Can the U.S. Get Out?
The dramatic Shi'ite walkout dealt a stinging blow to the Bush Administration's exit strategy and to Bremer, even if the disagreement can soon be smoothed over. Without ever appearing in public or communicating with American officials, Ayatullah Sistani showed just how much power he wields over Iraq's future. During the contentious negotiations to draft the basic law, Shi'ite members would frequently accept a point, then reopen the issue after hearing from Ayatullah Sistani. Now they were playing the same trick in public as a way to gain maximum leverage. But any attempt to revise the disputed clauses will probably infuriate the Kurds, who regard them as essential to protecting self-rule. Seven hours of talks inside the Governing Council chamber Friday night failed to produce any accord. The parties agreed to a two-day hiatus while the Shi'ites consulted Ayatullah Sistani and Bremer labored to keep the embarrassing blowup from turning into a permanent breakdown.

The range of ways to endow Iraqis with power offers "no really good solutions," says a senior intelligence official. Washington would prefer to keep the Governing Council, which it handpicked, or expand it to "replenish" the group with broader representation than the current lineup commands. But neither of those arrangements, if managed unilaterally by the U.S., would look more legitimate to Iraqis than the current council, which is broadly dismissed as nothing but a U.S. proxy. Another option bandied about is a grand conference of religious, tribal and ethnic leaders modeled on Afghanistan's loya jirga, which would pick an interim government. But, asks a frustrated State Department official involved in the planning, who would select the loya jirga delegates? The U.N. has tentatively floated the idea of giving a group of technocrats limited caretaker authority until elections are held, but no one has spelled out how that would work either.

The dilemma has produced an almost comical turn of events: the go-it-alone Bush Administration is desperately trying to lure the U.N. back into Iraq. "Time was, the U.N. wanted Iraq, and we wouldn't give it away," says a State Department official. "Now we can't give it away fast enough." Ask White House officials how things are progressing toward the June 30 deadline, and they sheepishly say they are waiting for the U.N. to take the lead. "They're going to take over the process, and we're going to follow their recommendations," says a Bush aide. The Administration is pinning its hopes on the proven diplomatic skills of U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who finessed the compromise over elections with Ayatullah Sistani last month. Washington is counting on him to pull off another coup by setting up Iraq's post-June 30 political structures. The veteran diplomat has responded with impressive sangfroid. "He's on vacation," says a top U.N. aide. The aide says Brahimi's plan is to ignore American entreaties to impose a solution and instead let the Iraqis thrash out their differences until they are desperate to compromise. As violence and political bickering threaten to fracture the country, Brahimi's strategy has its merits.

• Johanna McGeary