In Darkness, Waiting for Dawn

The deep “booms” come many mornings now. The explosions, often from artillery shells wired together in the trunk or backseat of a car, shear through the blazing summer heat. If you’re close, you’re dead. A few steps removed and you’re maimed. To those who are spared, the odor of burnt flesh both sickens and reminds that luck has been a partner today.

There is a backbeat, too, to these attacks -- a barrage of bullets pumped into a car or perhaps a single shot to the back of the head. Iraq’s assassination victims by now number as many as 1,000, although there is no official count. Some were academics, doctors and lawyers; others were Iraqis suspected of working with the U.S.-led occupation authority; still others were suspected former Baathists and followers of Saddam Hussein.

There are kidnappings, too. They seem mild by comparison because most captors merely seek a ransom, and the victim survives. But their spread has driven many of the country’s professionals out of the country.

The United States and its allies have ruled Iraq for more than a year and can cite a list of successes. The most important is that Iraq is free of Hussein’s tyrannical grip. People can say what they want, mostly, and are debating in a democratic way for the first time in memory.

But the occupation government has also failed notably in its attempts to restore security -- and as the restoration of sovereignty approaches, that reality is what dominates life for most Iraqis.

Beginning Wednesday, Iraqis selected by the United Nations and the United States will get a chance to repair their broken country. If they are skilled and lucky, and if they can persuade thousands of their countrymen to fight in the new security forces, they may achieve their goal: a country stable enough to hold free elections early next year. If skill and luck run out, the insurgency could intensify, and the simmering strife among Iraq’s three major groups -- Sunni Muslim Arabs, Shiite Muslim Arabs and Kurds -- could spiral into civil war.

The recent coordinated attacks against American troops and Iraqi police dominated headlines -- and obscured the signs of what awaits if security is not restored. On Saturday, insurgents believed to be Sunnis besieged a Shiite political party’s headquarters in Baqubah, about 30 miles north of Baghdad, killing three workers. Last week, six Shiite truck drivers were killed in the Sunni town of Fallouja after taking shelter in a police station. Last weekend, Kurds captured a handful of Sunni Arabs near Kirkuk after Arab attacks on Kurds. In recent days, Shiite factions faced off in southern Iraq for control of mosques and cities.

Iraqis and their American partners still face daunting hurdles in restoring public safety. Many of the Iraqis who once welcomed Americans as liberators now disdain them as occupiers. Yet the 163,000 U.S. and allied troops now in the country have no timetable for leaving. Quite the contrary: Over the coming year, their numbers are likely to grow.

For Americans, the price of occupation has already been far higher than the White House imagined -- in dollars, loss of life and erosion of U.S. credibility in the world. Before the invasion, the Bush administration predicted the new Iraq would be a self-governing, self-financing country that, with a little help, would quickly become a stable, prosperous and reliable ally. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said it was “hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself.” Under the Pentagon’s initial timetable, most U.S. troops were supposed to be home by now.

But the administration’s expectations turned out to be based on bad intelligence and wishful thinking. Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, deliberately sent the minimum number of troops necessary to Iraq, with little provision for unpleasant surprises. Bush and his aides, who disdained “nation-building,” did little to plan for what has become their principal foreign policy problem.

As a result, the administration was unprepared when the reality of Iraq fell short of its ideal. After the invasion, Baghdad’s police force and civil service disappeared overnight. Looters destroyed the government offices to which U.S. advisors had been told to report. The economy, the oil industry and public utilities were not self-starting. An underground insurgency launched by what occupation authorities called “former regime loyalists” grew, and Shiite radicals and Sunni nationalists began their own military efforts, the latter with assistance from foreign fighters.

U.S. fighting units designed and equipped for war against Hussein’s conventional army attempted to retool to battle guerrillas. The results, predictably, were mixed. American soldiers with no experience in the Arab world and no facility with its language found themselves kicking in the doors of terrified villagers.

Some Bush administration officials acknowledge that many of their initial expectations turned out to be wrong. “Of all the things that were underestimated, the one that almost no one that I know of predicted ... [was] the resilience of the regime that had abused this country for 35 years,” Wolfowitz told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month.

As a result, the United States is likely to remain deeply engaged in Iraq, with many thousands of troops on the ground and billions of dollars in spending, for years to come. The cost thus far -- the lives of 850 American troops and perhaps $120 billion -- is certain to rise.

It is far from clear that this commitment will win the prizes the administration sought: a real democracy in Iraq, a stable U.S. ally in the Arab world, a vital political and military base for a larger war against terrorism.

Instead, the question now is whether the United States and its Iraqi allies can succeed in staving off a far worse outcome: a bloody, dispirited Iraq, riven by civil strife, hostile to Americans -- and, in a worst-case scenario, hospitable to terrorists.

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From Liberators to Occupiers

On a hot day last summer in Baqubah, three American soldiers were guarding the city’s largest hospital. They sat in front of the main entrance playing cards. As one of the soldiers dealt a hand, a grenade fell among them and exploded. All three were torn to shreds. The grenade was dropped from one of the hospital’s upper floors.

The incident was shocking at the time, since there seemed to be no point to killing soldiers protecting a hospital. Now it looks like a symbol of what was beginning to go wrong for American hopes: The liberators were becoming occupiers.

Now, many months later, even being remotely associated with Americans brings danger. “The situation scares me,” confessed Hachim Hassani, minister of industry in the new interim government. “I cannot go walking around protected by U.S. soldiers; that would not be a good idea in this country. I have to protect myself with guards, but they are not well-trained -- and the people carrying out these bombings are well-trained.”

When it comes to large-scale firepower, the U.S. has won every battle it has joined. But military officers say quelling a grassroots insurgency also requires training local security forces, amassing intelligence and winning hearts and minds in the civilian population.

“It’s not that we don’t know what to do,” said Bruce Hoffman, a RAND Corp. military expert who served in Baghdad as an advisor to the occupation authority. “There are no original answers here. We need more [U.S.] troops. We need to train more indigenous forces. We need to secure the borders.”

A basic rule of fighting an insurgency, he added, is to avoid heavy-handed tactics such as wide-scale searches of homes that alienate civilians who are on the fence about the foreign military presence. U.S. units have often broken that rule in Iraq, he said, convincing many Iraqi nationalists to support the insurgency.

“This is where we’re losing the counterinsurgency,” Hoffman said. “We’ve alienated them. This was the silent majority, if you will.”

Over the last year, U.S. commanders have sought to apply those lessons. But much time has been lost, military officers acknowledge. The question now is whether the new Iraqi government and its fledgling security forces can stop more of the bombings and assassinations.

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Filling the Security Vacuum

American plans for new Iraqi security forces are nothing if not ambitious: an army of 35,000, including elite commando units and a national task force devoted to the counterinsurgency effort; a police force of 90,000, all trained in humane methods of law enforcement and equipped with modern weapons and body armor; a national guard, border patrol and security guards for buildings, oil pipelines and electricity facilities to reach a total of more than 260,000.

But training and equipment have come slowly. Fewer than a third of Iraqi policemen have completed even minimal training. Most still don’t have body armor, radios or vehicles. The projected army now stands at about 7,000.

Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. officer in charge of police training, said it will be months before the new Iraqi security forces are capable of shouldering most of the burden. “On 1 July, you’re not going to see a switch flipped that will transition from coalition to Iraqi security forces,” he told a congressional committee this month.

One problem, paradoxically, is that Iraq has too many police officers, because occupation authorities hired thousands of recruits pell-mell. Petraeus said he plans a buyout to trim one-quarter of the police force, mainly senior holdovers from the Hussein era.

“We’re keenly aware that it’s quality, not quantity, when it comes to police,” he said.

More important, though, has been the failure of the occupation authority to provide weapons and equipment for the new forces -- a problem that has caused tension between military officers and civilian bureaucrats. Several U.S. military officers described the delays as maddening and inexplicable.

Maj. Basel Abdul Aziz, who helps direct four Iraqi police stations in central Baghdad, said the American military promised him radios, flak jackets and vehicles for each station five months ago.

“At first they brought us 10 flak jackets, good ones, so we gave three to each station, then they brought us only the used ones,” he said.

He held up a battered bulletproof vest -- a hand-me-down from the U.S. military -- and shook his head. “Feel it,” he said with a smile. “It doesn’t have a plate in it; we experimented with them. We took them out in our courtyard and shot it, and the bullets went right through.”

Just last month, Iraqi security officers ordered to Najaf to help rout rebel cleric Muqtada Sadr’s Al Mahdi army refused to work because they had no bulletproof vests, were given nowhere to stay and had food they viewed as inedible.

Army Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division in the so-called Sunni Triangle for seven months, blamed the equipment logjam on the civilian bureaucracy of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. “It was being treated as ‘ho hum,’ ” he said. CPA officials denied treating the issue as unimportant, but acknowledged that funding had moved too slowly.

In any case, Petraeus said, the program is now being run by the U.S. Army.

“The equipment is flowing. It’s not flowing fast enough yet, but it is starting to come in,” he said.

He said the Iraqi National Guard should soon receive its full complement of “vehicles, body armor, uniforms, radios, weapons, ammunition, night vision and binoculars.”

Training every new member of the security forces will take longer -- well into 2005 at the current pace, and possibly beyond, officials estimated. Petraeus said his goal is to get “as many capable Iraqi security forces as we can” by the January target for Iraq’s first national election.

Meanwhile, U.S. troops will continue patrolling Iraq’s cities and launching sweeps and searches against suspected insurgents -- operations that, almost inevitably, make it difficult to win the hearts and minds of civilians in their paths.

When U.S. Marines responded to the killing and mutilation of four American contractors in the Sunni city of Fallouja by mounting a siege, many Iraqis who had merely tolerated the insurgents began to openly support them. A 13-year-old girl from Fallouja looked puzzled when asked whether she was afraid when the insurgents came to her house. She said they were “polite,” a word no Iraqi uses to describe the American military. An elderly aunt sitting nearby said, “These are our sons, our brothers, our cousins.”

Jawad Romi Lab Dainy, 61, a former officer in the Iraqi army, described his distress when American soldiers kicked open his front door and began flinging open cupboards, medicine chests and wardrobes. “We had some locked closets and I said, ‘I will open them for you -- here, I have the keys,’ but they would not listen,” said Dainy, who was arrested, held for five months and released without charges.

“I was at a checkpoint [in April], and they were searching women,” said Hassani, the newly appointed Cabinet minister. “Why are they doing that?” she said to her companion. “I’m sure they don’t understand how much this incites people. And then I went and introduced myself to this [American] officer, and he was very cooperative. And that minute, he told them to stop it. But that tells you how things get worse -- because the soldiers don’t understand.”

This cultural tone-deafness has caused the U.S. military unnecessary setbacks, some officers believe. “You have to be very surgical and precise in your application of lethal force ... so you don’t alienate 99% [of the population] in trying to take down 1%,” said Swannack, who battled insurgents in Fallouja.

“In my view, we are winning tactically and losing strategically,” he said.

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Winning Over the People

Battles for hearts and minds are waged not only with military force, but with good government and skilled salesmanship. But there, too, the occupation authority has struggled.

After a transitional constitution was hammered out by the coalition-appointed Iraqi Governing Council in March -- one of the occupation authority’s high points -- a strategic communications plan was supposed to kick in, said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution who served as a political advisor to L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. civilian administrator who heads the CPA.

“We hired a very expensive advertising company based in Britain -- very good at what they do -- to do television ads selling the [constitution] once it was adopted. These ads began in a very moving way, with the lullaby the young child sang at the [signing] ceremony on March 8. It’s a song all Iraqis know, Kurds and Sunnis and Shias alike.

“The television ads were due out maybe in early April. There was a campaign for leaflets to be produced. It was going to be beautifully orchestrated....

“Meanwhile, within a few days of the signing, crude leaflets came out all over the country denouncing the [constitution] on a number of key points,” he said. “They charged that the Iraqi people didn’t have involvement in the process, that it was a sellout to the Kurds.... They got there first, with a leaflet that they probably turned out on Xerox machines, and our elaborate multimillion-dollar stratcom campaign was simply preempted.

“And that’s a metaphor for the failure of stratcom. They weren’t close to the people. They weren’t adept. They couldn’t move quickly.”

That wasn’t the only failure to communicate. The occupation authority’s most ambitious outreach effort, its creation of a new Iraqi television network, has been, in the words of a senior official in Washington, “a debacle.”

The CPA signed an initial $30-million contract with SAIC, a major defense contractor with no media experience. “SAIC put a lot of money into terrestrial towers for [traditional] broadcasting ... when Iraqis were busy buying satellite dishes,” said Charles A. Krohn, a former Army public affairs officer who worked in the occupation last year. (SAIC gave up the contract last fall.)

“The crime is that we fooled ourselves into thinking we were communicating our most vital messages to the Iraqi public, when in fact people were watching [independent satellite channels] Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya instead” -- and getting an anti-occupation message.

Such failures are laid at the doorstep of the CPA, which came with several built-in bureaucratic problems. It faced a mission for which few U.S. officials had training. “There was no relevant experience anywhere,” Bremer said. “We haven’t done this in 50 years -- gone in and tried to rebuild a country like this.”

To make matters worse, some U.S. officials who had relevant experience -- State Department officers who had worked in places like Somalia and Haiti -- said they were initially locked out by a hostile Pentagon, which didn’t trust their views.

Instead, the CPA was staffed by a wide variety of volunteers -- State Department officials, members of other federal agencies, congressional aides, business executives and academics -- who sometimes came with more enthusiasm than expertise. Many signed up for stints that lasted only 90 days, barely long enough to begin understanding Iraq’s complexities. The three-month policy was changed when Bremer arrived. Subsequently, people had to serve six-month terms.

Some were Republicans devoted to Bush’s vision of a free-market democracy in Iraq as a beachhead for reform in the Arab world. They included Scott Carpenter, a former aide to Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.); Dan Senor, a former aide to then-Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.); Williamson Evers, a Hoover Institution education expert who was an advisor to the 2000 Bush presidential campaign; and Jay Hallen, a 24-year-old Yale graduate who applied for a job at the White House and instead landed the assignment of reopening the Baghdad Stock Exchange. (It hasn’t reopened yet.)

To be sure, there were Democrats in the CPA as well, including Walter Slocombe, a Defense Department official in the Clinton administration (he once called himself, jokingly, a “former regime loyalist”), and Noah Feldman, who did legal work for Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000.

It was only natural that most civilians who volunteered for service in Baghdad were committed to Bush’s vision. But the administration made that commitment an explicit part of its hiring policy. A senior State Department aide said the Pentagon recently urged that “passion” be a requirement for any foreign service officer who gets a job in the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Bremer also had to contend with frequent intervention and advice from higher-ups in Washington. His controversial early decrees to disband the Iraqi army and ban most former Baath Party members from government jobs, for example, carried out orders from Rumsfeld. Bremer agreed with both policies, but eventually found that he had to soften them.

What Iraqis noticed about Bremer’s inner circle was its startling youthfulness, significant in a traditional, hierarchical society in which older people rarely take orders from anyone younger.

“Bremer is a first-class politician,” said Hassani, the minister of industry. “But he can’t do it alone, and he doesn’t have too many smart people around him. But Iraq right now needs high-caliber people -- experienced people.”

Many Iraqis expected the United States to fix their country’s sagging infrastructure in a matter of weeks after last year’s invasion. After all, the U.S. military needed only 21 days to bring down the Hussein regime. American officials made plenty of promises, beginning with a vow to restore Iraq’s prewar level of electricity by June 2003. But the job turned out to be more difficult than the Americans expected, and the promises went unfulfilled.

The result was disillusionment. “Their perception was that we were so capable and so brilliant ... and now the lights were not on,” a former Bremer aide said. “I had [Iraqi] people say ... ‘You’ve got all the money in the world, why can’t you fix this? We expected more from you.’ ”

There were several reasons for the holdups. Iraq’s infrastructure was more decrepit than American planners had expected. The first U.S. contractors arrived with instructions to begin building a state-of-the-art electrical generating system that would be ready in two years, not to make quick fixes to the hodgepodge of equipment in place. Occupation authorities quickly switched gears.

“We scrounged some generators and said, ‘To hell with efficiency, let’s get some generators up,’ ” Slocombe recalled. But by then, anti-American insurgents had begun shooting at repair crews and sabotaging power lines. The equipment to repair power plants had to come to Baghdad by land, a dangerous nine-hour journey from Kuwait, five hours from Jordan.

By this April, security was so lacking that contractors pulled out in droves, including some of those working on key electrical facilities. The Doura power plant, which helped supply Baghdad, was all but abandoned by foreign technicians. By the end of April, most workers for Siemens, the giant German engineering firm, left. So did technicians for General Electric. By the end of May, the last Russian power contractor pulled out as well.

The newly free economy only made the problem worse. Iraqis were buying more air conditioners and other appliances, straining the system further. The CPA made the decision to distribute electricity equitably around the country, reversing Saddam’s policy of supplying plenty of power to Baghdad at the expense of the provinces. That made life in rural areas easier but didn’t improve moods in the capital.

American officials compounded the problem by making frequent announcements that progress was being made, despite the evidence Iraqis saw in their daily lives. Last October, Bremer announced that the goal of restoring prewar electricity levels had been reached, only to see production slip because of mechanical breakdowns and sabotage. The CPA said the goal was finally reached this month -- nationwide, but not in Baghdad.

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Sectarian Rifts Widen

When the Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani demanded late last year that elections be held to choose an interim government, large numbers of Iraqis applauded -- at first. But soon Sunni Muslims became suspicious, fearing that the goal was to use the large Shiite population to gain political control.

“We can say frankly that these elections proposed by Sistani are only for the benefit of Sistani and his followers,” said Sheik Mohammed Bashar Faidi, spokesman for the Board of Clergy and Scholars, one of the leading Sunni organizations in Iraq.

“First he showed flexibility, but then it turned out there is no flexibility,” he said.

Such signs of strife between Iraq’s religious and ethnic groups are still relatively minor, especially when compared to the widespread and devastating attacks on Iraqi security forces, civilians and foreigners. Iraqis often insist they will not succumb to fitna, the Arabic word for sectarian hatreds.

But ancient animosities are rising.

Barely beneath the surface is a bitter fight over which group can claim more people. For the most part, political power has been allocated -- in both the interim Governing Council, which was recently dissolved, and the newly appointed Iraqi government -- according to each group’s share of the population.

“The general belief of all Sunni people is that we’re the majority if the Kurds are counted as Sunnis,” Faidi said.

Shiites, however, routinely claim they are 60% or 65% of the population. Kurds insist they are 25%. The demographic debate is reminiscent of Lebanon, where Christians, Sunnis and Shiites have argued for decades about which group is the largest.

Ghazi Ajil Yawer, the new interim president of the country, sees an increasing tendency for people to identify with their ethnic or sectarian group.

“No one speaks about being Iraqi anymore,” he lamented in an interview with The Times shortly before being named president this month.

“If you look at the Governing Council, all of us were retreating to our corners more than before. Somebody is trying to manipulate the sectarian issues.”

Last week, Shiite political parties and religious organizations formed a council to represent their views, prompted by fears that Shiites may not get their fair share of influence in the new government, according to some prominent Shiites.

In May, the U.S. National Security Council’s Robert Blackwill, the United Nation’s Lakhdar Brahimi and Bremer met over and over as they tried to glue together a government that satisfied the ethnic and sectarian factions. They managed, but barely, and now the question is whether the new ministers and their affiliated groups can trust one another enough to push a united agenda.

The price of failure is apparent. Armed militias in Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish territories have routinely set up checkpoints and occasionally imposed their own order. Some attacks have occurred. The fear is that once armed activity starts, it cannot be contained. The experience of Lebanon, where Beirut fractured into neighborhoods rife with armed groups allied with political and sectarian factions, could be writ large in Iraq.

A former senior CPA official said civil strife “was one of the demons in the box” let out when Hussein was ousted. “That’s precisely the thing we worry about. For instance, really conservative Sunnis think Shiites are apostates,” the official said.

An American diplomat with long experience in the Arab world described three possible scenarios for Iraq in the years to come. One, he said, is dictatorship. Another is civil war. A third is a new government too weak to protect itself that depends on U.S. and allied forces to survive.

The scenario U.S. officials hope for -- the slow creation of a recognizable democracy -- looks increasingly unlikely, he said.

The new government’s officials “are either going to strike deals with [Hussein-era] commanders and units and people to be able to bring about some order or ... the alternative movement is in the direction of civil war,” the diplomat said.

He and others say that although it is risky to bring in former military leaders “because generals with militaries can topple governments ... that’s one road toward some stability.”

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New Government’s Opportunity

The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 expecting to take temporary custody of a modern state and a civil society that, with a little American advice and economic help, could quickly become a model for the Arab world.

Although that expectation was mistaken, a problem like Iraq stems from many causes. If Pentagon planners had anticipated the collapse of Iraq’s police forces and other basic services; if they had sent enough military police to stop the looting; if U.S. intelligence agencies had realized that Baath Party loyalists would melt away, regroup underground and launch an insurrection; if Bremer had not dismantled the Iraqi military and barred Baathists from the government so abruptly -- postwar Iraq still would have been no easy ride.

After July 1, Iraq will be under new management, both Iraqi and American. They do not have the luxury of a fresh start, but they can at least attempt a fresh approach.

“What I’ve been telling everybody is, once these folks are ... in charge of the country, then the disorder that is taking place in the country is no longer directed toward us,” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview. “Even though our soldiers may be getting hurt, it’s directed toward this new Iraqi government. So what do they want? A Hussein Iraqi government instead of this Iraqi government?

“That alone -- just having their own leaders, political leaders, in charge of them -- should boost their capability in the security field,” Powell said.

“Iraq is today a much better place than it was 15 months ago,” Bremer said.

“And they’re on a path now which gets them to a still better place, when they have a representative government and a decent economy.”

Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister who will be the public face of the new government -- and has already been the target of assassination threats -- is more sober about what he will inherit.

“I can tell it will be more dangerous” in the first months after June 30, he said. “All the indicators show the graph is going up. I think it will be difficult to bring it under control.”

As for his government’s principal goal, holding elections in early 2005, he said: “I really don’t know. I think it will be difficult.”

Iraqis and Americans once hoped that the return of Iraq’s sovereignty would be a celebration of the country’s recovery from tyranny and war. Instead, it is opening another uncertain chapter in a long saga.

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Rubin reported from Baghdad and McManus from Washington. Times staff writers Mary Curtius and Paul Richter in Washington also contributed to this report.