MOSUL, Iraq -- The U.S. Army has allowed several once-forceful supporters of Saddam Hussein's regime back into power here, including a religious leader who just weeks ago ordered Muslims to fight American troops to the death.

Convinced that sweeping out all officials associated with Hussein would result in a government too weak to hold Iraq together, U.S. forces in Mosul hope to win over their enemies by allowing them to sit on a new interim city council. . . .

A powerful member of the new council is Sheik Saleh Khalil Hamoody, who also heads the Mosul region's council of Islamic scholars. Several days after U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq began, Hamoody issued a fatwa, or edict, declaring that it was the religious duty of all Muslims to fight U.S.-led forces.

"Our valiant Iraq is facing a noble and faithful battle against imperialist and Zionist attackers who hate us," said the fatwa, which was approved by the Islamic scholars council. "They aim to destroy Islam and its existence to achieve their goals of world domination and to guarantee security for Zionism and its future."

Hamoody is widely known in northwestern Iraq for his close ties to the former Baath Party regime. He is a cousin of Hussein's former defense minister, Sultan Hashim Ahmad Jabburi Tai, who is on the U.S. military's list of most-wanted fugitives.

Hamoody was elected to the interim city council at a May 5 convention of about 150 community elders despite assurances from the commander of American forces here that U.S. intelligence would weed out candidates who were too closely associated with the toppled regime.

U.S. Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, who is in charge of northwestern Iraq as commander of the 101st Airborne Division, said he is aware of anti-American sentiment among some religious leaders in Mosul. He also acknowledged in an interview that he had not been informed about Hamoody's fatwa, and he said he might ask the imam to withdraw it in an official statement.

Alarmed by a sharp upsurge in street crime -- brazen daylight robberies, continued looting and the relatively recent phenomenon of violent carjackings -- Baghdad's professional class is rapidly arming itself, drawing on a vast pool of illicit weaponry that has flooded the capital since the fall of Saddam Hussein and his regime. . . .

The nervous well-to-do are not the only ones purchasing guns in this country where the streets, at least, were safe under Hussein. Ad hoc militias, criminal gangs, ethnic Kurds and rural tribesman also are all on a weapons-buying binge -- a development that is worrying to the U.S. forces that are trying to restore some semblance of order in both the capital and the countryside.

Thriving weapons bazaars have sprung up all over Baghdad, ranging from small, surreptitious knots of dealers operating out of their cars to sprawling, semipermanent markets where the gun merchants helpfully organize themselves by specialty, price range and degree of firepower. Just about everything is on offer, from scope-fitted sniper rifles to rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

No one has tried to publicly estimate the number of light weapons and handguns that have made their way onto the open market -- other than to say that the quantity is enormous, even for a country with an established gun culture.

Weapons stocks at abandoned Iraqi military bases, together with formidable arsenals at neighborhood and district headquarters of Hussein's Baath Party, were picked clean by looters in the days after U.S. troops moved into Baghdad. And that doesn't even include the weapons the Baath Party handed out to residents before the war for their country's defense. Many of these guns are up for grabs.

THE fastest regime change in Iraqi history occurred at Baghdad airport yesterday when Paul Bremer, Washington's new proconsul, took over running the country from Jay Garner, the much-criticised retired US Army general.

After less than a month in charge of the vast post- war reconstruction operation, General Garner and five top aides were eased out in a bloodless coup after failing to get government running in Iraq and to restore a semblance of normality to Baghdad. . . .

Although US officials insisted that the arrival of Mr Bremer, who will work alongside John Sawers, Tony Blair's special envoy, was not a reflection on General Garner, the facts suggested otherwise.

Baghdad today is a city without essential utilities, law and order or a functioning government. Nor does there appear to be any detailed plan to curtail the anarchy and to restore basic public services. Arguably the situation, far from improving, is deteriorating, with potentially dangerous political consequences for the coalition.

Barbara Bodine, a former US Ambassador to Yemen who was supposed to run the Baghdad region, was among those returning home. At one recent meeting with the press, she was asked about the shooting of a dozen Iraqis by US troops in Fallujah, a town outside Baghdad and within her jurisdiction. It was clear from her answer that she was unaware of the incident, which was making headline news around the world.

Margaret Tutweiler, another senior US diplomat and for-mer State Department spokeswoman, was supposed to be in charge of communications, but repeatedly she refused to meet the media in Baghdad.

The most damning assessment of General Garner's team comes from many Iraqis. Over the past three weeks, I was asked repeatedly: "Who is in charge?" Nobody had heard of their new leader.

Twenty-five federal agencies, plus dozens of state, local and Canadian government agencies, and the American Red Cross are all participating in the $16 million, five-day exercise known as TOPOFF2 -- because it's the second national exercise to test the preparation and coordination of the nation's top officials, on a regional and national level. . . .

Today at noon local time in Seattle, smoke billows from a burning car as a "bomb" explodes near a coffee shop. As local officials scramble to deal with as many as 100 casualties, they learn that radiation levels in the area have been heightened. This is no ordinary bomb, but rather a radiological dispersion device, or "dirty bomb."

In Washington, Ridge declares that the national terror threat threat level has gone to "Red," signaling that the country is under attack. A command center for the National Capital Region comprising the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia springs into action, as does the DHS command center in Ridge's offices.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, the same terrorists, known as GLODO (Group for the Liberation of Orangeland and the Destruction of Others) are supposed to release a biological agent at five different sites, and people start to exhibit flu-like symptoms such as fever, chills and aches. In the TOPOFF2 scenario, this is no flu; the germ the terrorists release is bubonic plague. When inhaled, the bacteria can cause the highly contagious and often deadly pneumonic plague.

Over the next several days, the "victims" of the biological attack will start showing up at Chicago-area hospitals (66 in all) and gradually tax their resources. The physicians and other hospital workers engaged in the exercise must first make diagnoses, then carry out tests, then have the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirm their fears. Meanwhile the initial "victims" have been "contaminating" others.

There's an international component, as well. Canadian government agencies will get involved both because of the proximity of Vancouver, British Columbia, to the Seattle attack, and because some of Chicago's plague "victims" will start arriving at Canadian airports.

The end of the exercise will come with the FBI capturing the "terrorists" late Thursday or early Friday.

Looters outran the WMD hunters almost every time. "Once a site has been hit with a 2,000-pound bomb, then looted, there's not a lot left," says Maj. Paul Haldeman, the 101st Airborne Division's top NBC officer. In the rush to Baghdad, Coalition forces raced past most suspected WMD sites, and looters took over. After Saddam's fall, there were too few U.S. troops to secure the facilities. Roughly 900 possible WMD sites appeared on the initial target lists. So far, V Corps officers say, fewer than 150 have been searched. "There aren't enough troops in the whole Army," says Col. Tim Madere, the overseer of V Corps's sensitive-site teams. "There just aren't enough experts to do everything." . . .

Some of the lapses are frightening. The well-known Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, about 12 miles south of Baghdad, had nearly two tons of partially enriched uranium, along with significant quantities of highly radioactive medical and industrial isotopes, when International Atomic Energy Agency officials made their last visit in January. By the time U.S. troops arrived in early April, armed guards were holding off looters -- but the Americans only disarmed the guards, Al Tuwaitha department heads told NEWSWEEK. "We told them, 'This site is out of control. You have to take care of it'," says Munther Ibrahim, Al Tuwaitha's head of plasma physics. "The soldiers said, 'We are a small group. We cannot take control of this site'." As soon as the Americans left, looters broke in. The staff fled; when they returned, the containment vaults' seals had been broken, and radioactive material was everywhere.

U.S. officers say the center had already been ransacked before their troops arrived. They didn't try to stop the looting, says Colonel Madere, because "there was no directive that said do not allow anyone in and out of this place." Last week American troops finally went back to secure the site. Al Tuwaitha's scientists still can't fully assess the damage; some areas are too badly contaminated to inspect. "I saw empty uranium-oxide barrels lying around, and children playing with them," says Fadil Mohsen Abed, head of the medical-isotopes department. Stainless-steel uranium canisters had been stolen. Some were later found in local markets and in villagers' homes. "We saw people using them for milking cows and carrying drinking water," says Ibrahim. The looted materials could not make a nuclear bomb, but IAEA officials worry that terrorists could build plenty of dirty bombs with some of the isotopes that may have gone missing. Last week NEWSWEEK visited a total of eight sites on U.N. weapons-inspection lists. Two were guarded by U.S. troops. Armed looters were swarming through two others. Another was evidently destroyed many years ago. American forces had not yet searched the remaining three.

BAGHDAD, May 12 -- Baghdad residents and U.S. officials said today that U.S. occupation forces are insufficient to maintain order in the Iraqi capital and called for reinforcements to calm a wave of violence that has unfurled over the city, undermining relief and reconstruction efforts and inspiring anxiety about the future.

Reports of carjackings, assaults and forced evictions grew today, adding to an impression that recent improvements in security were evaporating. Fires burned anew in several Iraqi government buildings and looting resumed at one of former president Saddam Hussein's palaces. The sound of gunfire rattled during the night; many residents said they were keeping their children home from school during the day. Even traffic was affected, as drivers ignored rules in the absence of Iraqi police, only to crash and cause tie-ups. . . .

[T]he British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, expressed disappointment with efforts so far to bring democracy to Iraq. He told the British Parliament that "results in the early weeks have not been as good as we would have hoped." Straw also said the lack of security in Baghdad has been disappointing.

An office and warehouse belonging to the aid group CARE were attacked Sunday night. In two other weekend incidents, two CARE vehicles were seized by armed men, the organization reported today, asking the U.S. occupation forces to "take immediate steps to restore law and order to Baghdad."

"The violence is escalating," said Anne Morris, a senior CARE staff member. "We have restricted staff movement for their own safety. What does it say about the situation when criminals can move freely about the city and humanitarian aid workers cannot?" . . .

The Pentagon announced early this month that an additional 4,000 soldiers were being dispatched to Baghdad, bringing the total in the city to 16,000. The composition of the force will shift as combat units head home and the number of military police officers grows from 2,000 to about 4,000 by mid-June.

Ashraf Base, Iraq: Iranian rebels in Iraq have begun to surrender to US forces under a deal that effectively ends the heavily armed People's Mujahidin as a fighting force. US forces in Iraq said in a statement that the decades-old group agreed at high-level talks that within a week all of its thousands of fighters would be detained by US. The Mujahidin, labelled terrorists by Washington, also accepted that all their heavy weapons would be placed in a desert base near the Iranian border and controlled by US troops.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 12 -- The Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, who will play a crucial role in the formation of the interim government in Iraq, said today that the United States risked squandering its victory over Saddam Hussein by allowing chaos and anarchy to run unchecked in the country.

Mr. Barzani spoke in an interview on the day that a new civilian administrator, J. Paul Bremer III, arrived in the Iraqi capital to take over the task of rebuilding the country from Jay Garner, the retired Army lieutenant general first appointed to that mission. . . .

The sudden personnel overhaul has rattled Iraqi political leaders who have been working closely with General Garner, and none was more disappointed that Mr. Barzani, who worked with the general a decade ago when Iraq's Kurdish minority fled by the hundreds of thousands to the Turkish border region to escape the wrath of Mr. Hussein after an unsuccessful uprising.

"His departure will have a very negative effect," Mr. Barzani said. "The rapid change of officials is not very helpful because we need focus."

Elaborating, Mr. Barzani said that "major mistakes have been made" in the military and civilian management of postwar Iraq, "and if we continue in this confusion, this wonderful victory we have achieved will turn into a quagmire."

This concern now radiates far beyond the immediate region. In London today, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said that "the situation in Baghdad is not satisfactory" and he acknowledged that it was the responsibility of the United States and its coalition partners "to ensure that it becomes satisfactory very quickly."

He spoke after meeting with the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, who conveyed an even stronger sense of alarm.

"In the majority of the country, there is instability, which threatens the territorial integrity and the unity of Iraq, which is of extreme concern to the countries of the region," Prince Saud said.

He said the ongoing violence, including almost hourly eruptions of gunfire in Baghdad, would undermine the distribution of humanitarian aide "and it threatens a breakdown in order altogether."

The Bush administration has admitted that Saddam Hussein probably had no weapons of mass destruction.

Senior officials in the Bush administration have admitted that they would be 'amazed' if weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were found in Iraq.

According to administration sources, Saddam shut down and destroyed large parts of his WMD programmes before the invasion of Iraq.

Ironically, the claims came as US President George Bush yesterday repeatedly justified the war as necessary to remove Iraq's chemical and biological arms which posed a direct threat to America.

Bush claimed: 'Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We will find them.'

The comments from within the administration will add further weight to attacks on the Blair government by Labour backbenchers that there is no 'smoking gun' and that the war against Iraq -- which centred on claims that Saddam was a risk to Britain, America and the Middle East because of unconventional weapons -- was unjustified.

The senior US official added that America never expected to find a huge arsenal, arguing that the administration was more concerned about the ability of Saddam's scientists -- which he labelled the 'nuclear mujahidin' -- to develop WMDs when the crisis passed.

This represents a clearly dramatic shift in the definition of the Bush doctrine's central tenet -- the pre-emptive strike. Previously, according to Washington, a pre-emptive war could be waged against a hostile country with WMDs in order to protect American security.

Now, however, according to the US official, pre-emptive action is justified against a nation which simply has the ability to develop unconventional weapons.

The war against terrorism, like the war against Iraq, functions in all but total indifference to facts. An unnamed "senior Bush administration official" told the press last weekend that he would be amazed if weapons-grade plutonium or uranium were found in Iraq. It was also unlikely, he said, that biological or chemical weapons material would be found. He said that the United States never expected to find such a smoking gun.

What was the Iraq war all about then? The official said that what Washington really wanted was to seize the thousand nuclear scientists in Iraq who might in the future have developed nuclear weapons for Saddam Hussein. He described them as "nuclear mujahidin."

The preventive war, according to this redefinition, was not directed against an actual problem, but one that might have appeared in the future. One might have thought the official's statement merely an excuse for the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found, but this time it is President George W Bush who seems not to have been told. He is still assuring Americans that the illicit weapons will turn up.

Last week, [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz gave an interview to CNN-Turk, a joint venture of CNN and a Turkish media conglomerate. When asked about the future of U.S.-Turkish relations, Wolfowitz said that if Turkey wanted to get back into America's good graces, the Turks would have to admit they were wrong to deny the U.S. permission to use their territory as a staging ground for invading Iraq and, in essence, apologize.

That's a rough demand for a fellow democracy and a longtime ally. But what raised the ire of many Turks was another of Wolfowitz's statements: the Bush administration, he said, was disappointed that the Turkish military "did not play the strong leadership role on that issue [i.e., the Iraq debate] that we would have expected."

Outside the context of Turkish politics, that statement might seem obscure or insignificant. But in Turkey the meaning seemed painfully clear: The United States wished the Turkish military had either overruled the elected government or perhaps even pushed it aside in favor of one more subservient to U.S. demands. . . .

Turkey is currently struggling to accomplish something very similar to what we're trying to demonstrate in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East: that pluralism, democracy and Islam can peaceably coexist. It doesn't say much for our sincerity or seriousness if we push the generals to step in the moment we can't get the elected government to do our bidding. (It's not even shrewd politics since the Turkish military had its own reasons for resisting our plans for Iraq.)

Britain back-tracked on the contentious issue of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction yesterday when the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, was forced to concede that hard evidence might never be uncovered.

He said it was "not crucially important" to find them, because the evidence of Iraqi wrongdoing was overwhelming.

He dismissed the significance of the failure to find banned weapons on the grounds that Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, had uncovered a "phenomenal amount of evidence" before the war. . . .

As criticism for the failure to find banned weapons has increased, ministers have struggled to offer a plausible explanation. Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, found himself the object of ridicule last month when he feigned ignorance of Downing Street's claim in last September's weapons "dossier" that an attack could be launched within 45 minutes.

He also caused some astonishment by declaring that the sudden onslaught of war, even though several days passed between the departure of inspectors and first bombings, prevented the Iraqis reassembling their hidden weapons.

He added to the confusion last night when he appeared to contradict both himself and Mr Straw by saying that allied troops would uncover evidence of banned weapons. . . .

Similar back-tracking is apparent in Washington where the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said last week that the US was pinning its hope on finding incriminating documents rather than actual weapons.

If your name is David Nelson you can expect to be hassled, delayed, questioned and searched before being allowed to board aircraft anywhere in the United States for the foreseeable future.

Since the horrific attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the federal Transportation Security Administration has, without any public announcement, created a two-tiered list of names "to protect our aviation system," says Nico Melendez, the agency spokesman for the West Coast, who is based in Los Angeles.

The name David Nelson apparently is on one of those lists. . . .

One after another, local David Nelsons tell the same story: At airports their bags are put through bomb detectors; they are delayed, searched, questioned. . . .

As David Nelsons all over the country have learned, once your name is on the list, there's no way you can get it removed. Every time you go to an airport, you're assumed to be guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. . . .

Somewhere in the world there's an actual terrorist suspect named David Nelson who started all this mess. Several David Nelsons have been told by security or airline personnel that he's from Nashville.

But they're looking for him everywhere. Portland radiologist David Nelson "never could figure out why I was constantly getting flagged. Our bags would always come back with tape around them, saying they had been searched." His son and namesake, David Wesley Nelson, who's 27, thought he was always stopped "because of my age." When he flew to Los Angeles recently, "they gave me a big hassle because I didn't have a passport. I said, 'I don't normally carry a passport when traveling within the U.S.' "

With a swipe of a budget-committee pen, Missouri almost dropped from one of the top states in caring for children to dead last.

Like lawmakers nationwide, Missouri legislators are struggling to close a gaping budget gap. Theirs is $323 million. So the house voted to eliminate its State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which insures children just over the poverty level - potentially making Missouri the first state to abolish the five-year-old program designed to give America's children the same medical care it affords the elderly.

From Connecticut to Montana, budget cutbacks are affecting everything from gym classes to fire stations. But one of the most emotional areas that may be pruned is children's healthcare. While every downturn brings fiscal dilemmas, the current quandary poses piercing questions about whether medical care is a right or a commodity, and where federal responsibility lies in caring for the vulnerable.

But one thing is clear: Hundreds of thousands of the more than 5 million children covered for the first time under SCHIP may find their insurance curtailed - or gone. Only a handful of states are talking about eliminating SCHIP. But dozens are trimming eligibility, benefits, and enrollment in a program that was the most dramatic expansion of low-income federal healthcare in 40 years. . . .

The battle over SCHIP in Missouri is typical of what's playing out nationwide. Opponents argue that the program is just too generous in tough fiscal times. Supporters - including parents, low-income advocates, economists, and health-policy analysts - argue that it saves money in the long term through preventive care.

Add to that the financial incentive from Washington. For every dollar Missouri spends on SCHIP, the federal government sends almost three: the state's contribution of $25 million was leveraging more than $72 million.

Then there's the healthcare spiral. If SCHIP were eliminated, another 83,000 would join Missouri's uninsured. Each time another person loses insurance, it adds to the crisis by sending costs higher. And each time costs rise, more people end up uninsured. . . .

For many healthcare advocates, this year is just round one in what they worry could be a slow erosion of SCHIP. The Bush administration has proposed combining SCHIP with Medicaid and turning the matching-grant programs into one block grant. Then, instead of federal funds increasing with state spending, each state would get a set amount of money. In exchange, the federal government would give states more flexibility in designing their own healthcare programs.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 16 -- In an abrupt reversal, the United States and Britain have indefinitely put off their plan to allow Iraqi opposition forces to form a national assembly and an interim government by the end of the month.

Instead, top American and British diplomats leading reconstruction efforts here told exile leaders in a meeting tonight that allied officials would remain in charge of Iraq for an indefinite period, said Iraqis who attended the meeting. It was conducted by L. Paul Bremer, the new civilian administrator here. . . .

No date was set for creating an interim authority, and no details about its powers and functions were discussed in the meeting, the Iraqis said. Mr. Bremer said he would meet with the opposition leaders for further discussions in two weeks.

"They retracted what they said before," an Iraqi political figure said. The provisional government idea is gone, he said. As for the idea of convening a national assembly to select a government, he said, "there is no such thing anymore."

Today's decision was a disappointment for the former opposition forces and their supporters in the Pentagon and the Congress, where officials had been pressing for an early turnover of sovereign power to a government formed by the opposition groups.

On April 28, the United States and Britain sponsored a political gathering of about 300 Iraqis and supported their call for a national conference to meet by the end of May to select a transitional government. Zalmay Khalilzad, who has served as President Bush's envoy to the Iraqi opposition, was a co-chairman of the April meeting, but did not return to Iraq for tonight's meeting.

On May 5, Jay Garner, the civilian administrator who preceded Mr. Bremer, said the core of a new Iraqi government would emerge this month. "Next week, or by the second weekend in May, you'll see the beginning of a nucleus of a temporary Iraqi government, a government with an Iraqi face on it that is totally dealing with the coalition," General Garner said during a visit to Basra.

Disarming Saddam Hussein of his "weapons of mass destruction" was the main justification the Bush administration used both at home and abroad for attacking Iraq. But while other countries that opposed the U.S. military action claim they are vindicated by the failure so far to find those weapons, Americans -- even some of Bush's political opponents -- seem content with the low-casualty victory and believe the discoveries of mass graves and other Hussein atrocities justify the war. . . .

According to a May 1 Gallup poll for CNN and USA Today, 79 percent of Americans said the war with Iraq was justified even without conclusive evidence of the illegal weapons, while 19 percent said discoveries of the weapons were needed to justify the war. An April Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 72 percent supported the war even without a finding of chemical or biological weapons. Similarly, a CBS News poll found that 60 percent said the war was worth the blood and other costs even if weapons are never found.

It's not that Americans don't care about finding the weapons Bush said Hussein had; in an April 16 Post-ABC poll, 47 percent said it was essential. But that made it a lower priority than providing humanitarian aid to Iraq and restoring order.

"If I were a Democratic candidate, I don't think I would be pushing this issue,' said Andrew Kohut, of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. He cited a Gallup poll in the early days of the war determining that 38 percent thought the war justified even if the banned weapons were not found; toward the end of the conflict, that figure jumped to 58 percent. . . .

But the international community may not be so understanding. False accusations about Iraq's weapons could make the rest of the world even more reluctant to join the next effort to enforce Bush's policy of striking at emerging threats. "The American public is moving on, but those countries that were skeptical of this war are going to continue to press on this point," said Jonathan Tucker, a weapons expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace. "The credibility of the administration and the U.S. intelligence community are still on the line. This whole doctrine of preemptive war is predicated on our ability to determine a country's potential threat before the weapons are used."

US and British plans for rebuilding Iraq were descending into chaos this weekend as officials admitted they had indefinitely scrapped plans for a transitional government and Spain revealed a gaping hole in funding for reconstruction. . . .

Huge divisions are now apparent within Iraq's opposition, not least between returning Iraqi exiles, like Ahmed Chalabi, who have been demanding prominent positions in any transitional government, and the grassroots movements, many of them focused on local Shia leaders who are demanding an Islamic state.

Meanwhile there is a crisis over funding for reconstruction following claims that oil revenue will fall far short of the $41 billion (£26bn) re-quired over the next two years to get the shattered nation on its feet. Before the war senior US administration officials, including President George W. Bush, suggested that the sale of Iraqi oil - at present still covered by UN sanctions and administered by the UN's Oil For Food programme - would largely pay for the reconstruction.

But new figures produced by Spain's Ministry of Economic Affairs and sent to the World Bank, UN and International Monetary Fund have led the Spanish government to conclude that oil revenues are likely to fall far short of the contribution originally envisaged. According to the Spanish figures, the $41bn total is likely almost to double over 10 years, and even that calculation has been challenged by international aid agencies working in Iraq who fear the figure could rise to as much as $250bn over the same period. . . .

The scale of the expected shortfall in funding has been underlined by the US commitment to reconstruction, a slim $2.5bn approved by Congress. US Treasury Secretary John Snow insisted last week that countries like France and Germany, who opposed the war, would have to make substantial contributions.

The administration, without explanation, has replaced retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner, the Pentagon's chief reconstruction official, with L. Paul Bremer III, a former Reagan administration diplomat who arrived in Baghdad on Tuesday and immediately unleashed major changes in policy. U.S. forces increased patrols across Baghdad, launched an aggressive pursuit of criminals and started imprisoning looters for 20 days.

Bremer and his aides also halted the withdrawal of any U.S. forces and commenced a high-level, comprehensive review of security needs. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld called security his number one priority and touted the arrival of more than 15,000 additional troops -- bringing the U.S. presence to nearly 160,000. There also are 40,000 British troops in the country.

On Friday, Bremer issued a written directive banning 15,000 to 30,000 ranking members of Hussein's Baath Party from holding government jobs, reversing a policy -- developed during months of discussions before the war began -- that would have excluded only the party's most senior members from government service.

How and why senior military and civilian leaders at the Pentagon were caught unaware of the need to quickly make the transition from war-fighting to stability operations with adequate forces mystifies military officers, administration officials and defense experts with peacekeeping experience from the 1990s. . . .

In recent Pentagon news conferences, Rumsfeld has denied charges that there were too few troops in Iraq to restore order. He noted that 15,000 troops from the 1st Armored Division and hundreds of additional military police officers are soon to arrive in Baghdad, bringing overall U.S. troop levels in Iraq to almost 160,000.

Although that represents 40 percent of the Army's 10 active duty divisions, it is still relatively small on a per-capita basis when compared with previous peacekeeping missions -- when 60,000 U.S. and allied forces secured 4 million people in Bosnia and 40,000 troops secured 2 million people in Kosovo. Iraq has a population of 23 million.

Before the war began, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, told Congress that "several hundred thousand" forces could be necessary to stabilize Iraq after a war. Several days later, Wolfowitz told another congressional committee that far fewer troops would be needed, calling Shinseki's estimate "way off the mark."

BAGHDAD, Iraq –– Thousands of Shiite Muslims marched peacefully through the capital Monday to protest the American occupation of Iraq and reject what they feared would be a U.S.-installed puppet government. Small groups of U.S. infantrymen, including snipers on nearby rooftops, watched the rally but did not intervene. Several dozen Shiite organizers armed with AK-47 assault rifles patrolled the area. They, too, were left alone by the Americans. Up to 10,000 people gathered in front of a Sunni Muslim mosque in Baghdad's northern district of Azimiyah, then marched across a bridge on the Tigris River to the nearby Kadhamiya quarter, home to one of the holiest Shiite shrines in Iraq. It appeared to be the largest protest against the U.S. occupation since the war ended.

What Bush did was not a total novelty. His brazen unilateralism is built on tendencies which have never been absent from US foreign policy. Clinton used military force at least three times without security council authority: in Bosnia in 1995, in bombing Baghdad for four days in December 1998, and in attacking Yugoslavia over Kosovo in 1999.

But Bush's behaviour was different on three counts. His drive for war on Iraq was prompted by a new doctrine of pre-emption. During the council debates, Washington, echoed by London, used the old UN language of saying Iraq posed an imminent threat to international peace and security; but Bush had made it clear several months earlier that the US would act against states even before they posed an actual danger. This was a dangerous carte blanche for interventions almost anywhere.

Secondly, Bush was trying to achieve regime change in Iraq. Clinton's three unsanctioned uses of force had more limited objectives. No wonder countries such as France and Russia felt they could not allow the UN to approve the attack on Iraq.

Bush's third innovation was to issue a direct challenge to the UN. When Clinton intervened against Yugoslavia, it was clear that Russia and China would veto action and so the US never drafted a resolution calling for force. Bush bluntly demanded the UN show its "relevance". "All the world faces a test and the UN a difficult and defining moment. Will it serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?" he said. In fact, every veto since 2000 has been cast by the US. . . .

Most observers concur that the current outlook is bleak. The need for security council reform, and the debate over when humanitarian interventionism can be legal, have been perverted by the agenda and behaviour of the Bush administration and the suspicions it has engendered.

But analysts see some grounds for optimism. The neo-conservatives are not the only people in Washington, and Bush could lose the election next year. More immediately, he could realise he needs the UN to help salvage Iraq's postwar chaos.

In the long term, they argue, the UN gained more from the global effect of legitimising itself in the eyes of a new generation as a forum for world opinion -thanks to the pre-war security council debates - than it lost from the US decision to ignore the UN's will. "We shouldn't see everything in terms of US versus UN," says Mats Berdal of King's College, London. "The UN has taken a knock but not as severe a one as it seems," says Paul Rogers of Bradford University's department of peace studies. "The 96% of the world which is not American views the UN more positively. Look how the five 'swing' states in the security council resisted US pressures to buy them off. It was remarkable and over the next few years this may develop."

Lawlessness and chaos continue to reign. Women are raped, law-abiding citizens have their property stolen, those who have anything left don't go to work so they can guard what they still have. The prize the United States sacrificed so much to gain--freeing Iraq from Saddam and clearing the way for its democratic rebirth--is being squandered on the ground as ordinary Iraqis come to equate the American presence with violent lawlessness and immorality, and grasping mullahs rush into the vacuum created by our lack of troops. Mass grave sites, with no troops to secure them, have been unearthed by Iraqis desperate to find remnants of relatives killed by Saddam Hussein's regime, but those same Iraqis, digging quickly and roughly, may have inadvertently destroyed valuable evidence of human rights violations and crippled the ability of prosecutors to bring war criminals to justice. Perhaps worst of all, the prime objective of the entire invasion--to secure and eliminate Saddam's weapons of mass destruction capacity--has been dealt a serious blow. Even Iraq's publicly known nuclear sites had been thoroughly looted before American inspectors arrived, because, once more, not enough troops had been available to secure them. Radioactive material, perhaps enough to make several "dirty bombs," has now disappeared into anonymous Iraqi homes, perhaps awaiting purchase by terrorists. Critical records detailing the history and scope of the WMD program have themselves been looted from suspected weapons sites because too few soldiers were available to guard those places. "There aren't enough troops in the whole Army," said Col. Tim Madere, the officer overseeing the WMD effort in Iraq, in a recent interview with Newsweek. Farce vied with disaster when the inspectors' own headquarters were looted for lack of adequate security. Triumph on the battlefield has yielded to tragedy in the streets.

Belatedly recognizing their horrendous miscalculation, the Bush administration last month replaced the retired general in charge of Iraq's reconstruction, Jay Garner, with former diplomat L. Paul Bremer, who immediately called for 15,000 more troops to keep order. Even if he gets that many, however, Bremer will still be woefully short of the manpower he'll need to turn Iraq from anarchy to stable democracy. . . .

In many ways, the contrast between warfighting and nation-building resembles the difference between productivity in the manufacturing and service industries. Businessmen have long known that you can rather easily substitute capital and technology for labor in manufacturing. Until very recently, however, it's been far more difficult to do so for the service industries. A similar principle applies to military affairs. In warfighting, everything ultimately comes down to sending a projectile downrange. How you send the bullet (or bomb) makes a difference--you can use an infantryman with a rifle, or a B-52 launching a cruise missile. But the effect at the far end is the same--the delivery of kinetic or explosive energy. Over the last 50 years, American strategy has made increasing use of effective technology, substituting machines for men, both to reduce casualties and to outrange our enemies.

But this trading of capital for increased efficiency breaks down in the intensely human missions of peace enforcement and nation-building. American wealth can underwrite certain aspects of those missions: schools, roads, water purification plants, electric power. But it can't substitute machines or money in the human dimension--the need to place American soldiers (or police officers) on patrol to make the peace a reality.

Mammoth defense spending bills bloated with both new military technology and obsolescent weaponry are being rushed to breakneck approval this week as the administration exploits Congress's weakness for leaving no defense contractor unrewarded. The costliest defense budget since the cold war -- more than $400 billion and counting -- is being gaveled through by the Republican leadership in a breathtaking few days of glancing debate. Good ideas for reforming the military are included. But so are outdated submarines and jet fighters designed for combat against the defunct Soviet threat.

There is a reasonable $1.7 billion for the next generation of unmanned aerial drones and an unreasonable $42 billion for anachronistic fighter planes. As social, education and health care programs are being squeezed, the Pentagon is asking for $9 billion to build a missile defense system that does not work yet.

The waste easily runs into the tens of billions of dollars, making Congress's haste this week all the more outrageous. The armed forces obviously deserve decent pay, better housing and the most effective new technologies and weapons. But these bills provide windfalls for the military, for defense contractors and, not incidentally, for lawmakers who need the hometown pork and fat-cat contributions being subsidized by the new double-dip military-industrial complex. For all his tough talk, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is not taking on the generals and Congress to challenge the voracious old ways of military budgeting.

Senate Democrats launched an impassioned but ultimately futile effort Tuesday to prevent the Bush administration from lifting a 10-year-old ban on the development of smaller, more usable nuclear warheads and dramatically shifting the nation's defense policies.

The procedural vote went 51-43 against the Democratic effort, which pushes the proposed repeal of the ban -- and a potentially historic resumption of nuclear weapons development -- to the House.

The full House is expected to vote later this week on the issue, which both sides say could mark a critical turn in the country's security policy.

The Democratic stance was put in the most graphic terms Tuesday by Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, who with Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California led the effort to retain the weapons ban. The new, low-yield warheads, Kennedy contended, would be easier to use and thus make nuclear conflict more likely, not less so.

"Is half a Hiroshima OK? Is a quarter Hiroshima OK? Is a little mushroom cloud OK?" he asked on the Senate floor. "That's absurd. The issue is too important. If we build it, we'll use it." . . .

Near the end of the Cold War, the United States not only negotiated a series of large reductions in its strategic nuclear weapons with Russia, but it decided to withdraw nearly all of its smaller tactical nuclear warheads, feeling they were no longer needed.

Congress passed the Spratt-Furse Amendment in 1993 in response to that withdrawal. It was an effort to prevent those smaller weapons from returning, in large part because they are considered more usable, and thus more dangerous.

The Bush administration has adopted an aggressive nuclear policy, calling for a repeal of that low-yield ban and an approach that would permit the first use of nuclear weapons to destroy dangerous weapons caches in enemy hands.

Baghdad's most powerful Shia cleric warned yesterday that he would use a "hand of iron" to impose an extreme vision of Islam that could seriously challenge America's secular ambitions for Iraq.

Sheikh Mohammed al-Fartousi, a youthful hardliner, said he would enforce a new fatwa that bans alcohol, commands women to wear veils and orders cinemas to close.

The sheikh appears to have considerable popular support in the vast, impoverished Shia district in eastern Baghdad formerly known as Saddam City, where his supporters stepped in swiftly to fill the power vacuum after the war.

Sheikh Fartousi, 31, admitted having up to 1,000 armed, former soldiers under his control, several of whom were guarding his office yesterday at the small al-Hekma mosque. While US troops continue to patrol most of Baghdad, none was in evidence in the Shia district yesterday. . . .

Although a relatively young cleric, Sheikh Fartousi is a leading figure in the al-Sadr movement, based around the followers of Imam Mohammed al-Sadr, a senior Shia cleric who was executed by Saddam in 1999. It is one of several Shia factions vying for power in the new Iraq, though its influence is evident in the decision to rename the Shia suburb of eastern Baghdad Sadr City.

Sheikh Fartousi said he was sent to Baghdad immediately after the war by the Hawza, the Shias' intellectual centre in the holy city of Najaf. He had worked for the clerics there, supervising Islamic schools.

It appears last Friday's fatwa was not officially approved by the Hawza

The Pentagon yesterday dropped its opposition to allowing UN nuclear inspectors into Iraq, amid rising concern that looters stole radioactive material during the war.

The announcement was made by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who said the Pentagon had "no problem with" the inspectors' return, but the final decision is expected to be hammered out at the UN this week, when the overall shape of postwar Iraq is to be debated.

The US has come under increasing pressure to allow UN weapons inspectors into the country after the failure of American troops so far to find weapons of mass destruction. Some members of the security council also argue that only the UN can verify that Iraq is free of banned weapons, and therefore lift sanctions.

However, the apparent disappearance of radioactive material from Tuwaitha - the Iraqi nuclear research centre near Baghdad sealed by the UN after the last Gulf war - after looters ransacked its network of bunkers during and immediately after the recent war, has caused alarm at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency. . . .

The Pentagon had opposed the return of UN inspectors, believing that they would interfere with its own investigation, but Mr Rumsfeld indicated yesterday that that opposition had been dropped.

"I've checked with General [Tommy] Franks, the combatant commander, and he has no problem with their going in [to Tuwaitha]," the defence secretary said.

"The reason I think it might not be a bad idea for them to come in is that they probably have inventories of all of that and would be in a position to know what was there, or what they thought was there, and where the seals were and what it looked like the last time they were there."