BAGHDAD -- Though the Bush administration has for months claimed that foreign fighters were entering Iraq to kill Americans, U.S. military commanders who are responsible for monitoring the borders here say that they have not witnessed a large infiltration of foreign terrorists.

As recently as Tuesday, President Bush said that "the foreign terrorists are trying to create conditions of fear and retreat because they fear a free and peaceful state in the midst of a part of the world where terror has found recruits."

But officers whose areas of operations include Iraq's borders with Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran -- the primary Arab entry points into Iraq -- all said there is no evidence that a significant number of foreign terrorists have entered the country.

"We cover the border, so we would know if they came in or not," said Lt. Col. Antonio Aguto, executive officer of the U.S. Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which monitors Iraq's border with Syria and Saudi Arabia. "Most of them are locals."

The officers said that very few foreigners have been captured while crossing into Iraq illegally, arrested later inside Iraq or detained when trying to enter the country at existing border checkpoints.

One intelligence officer said emphatically that there was simply no evidence to support the claim.

"We keep hearing that, but we haven't seen anything to back it up," the officer said.

The contradiction suggests that, seven months after U.S. troops entered Baghdad, the military still is not certain who is carrying out the more than 30 attacks per day on troops, military installations, Iraqi police stations, buildings and other targets. . . .

On different days this week, officials in Washington and Baghdad blamed the attacks on foreign terrorists, Hussein, an aged Hussein confidant named Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, bin Laden, a northern Iraqi terrorist group named Ansar al-Islam and possibly another shadowy terrorist, Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, who is believed to be in Jordan, Lebanon or Iraq. . . .

Confirmation of an outside terrorist connection would bolster the case made by Bush and his top aides that the conflict is another front in the global war on terrorism.

Administration officials long have said that ties between Hussein and bin Laden are extensive and longstanding. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld argued Hussein was harboring terrorists before the war.

Terrorism experts have challenged that suggestion.

"I think there were nodes of contact," said Mangus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism at St. Andrews University in Scotland. "I don't think they were very strong."

Nor is it clear just how viable Ansar al-Islam is today. The group, which maintained training facilities in northwestern Iraq, was bombed heavily during the war, and Kurdish forces moved in afterward.

Yet, Air Force Gen. Norton Schwartz, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters nearly two weeks ago that Ansar is "our principal organized terrorist adversary in Iraq right now."

Other news reports later cited an administration official stating that the group was working with al-Douri, the Hussein aide, to coordinate attacks on U.S. forces. The official said the information came from two captured Ansar operatives.

When asked during a news briefing Thursday what percentage of foreign fighters make up the opposition in Iraq, Rumsfeld said, "I don't have as good an answer as I ought to. I keep pushing at that and trying to find out."

A few minutes later Rumsfeld said that "a large number of innocent Iraqis have been killed by Iraqis and by foreign terorists."

FALLUJAH, Iraq -- Insurgents shot down a U.S. Chinook helicopter in central Iraq on Sunday as it carried troops headed for R&R, killing 15 soldiers and wounding 21 in the deadliest single strike against American troops since the start of war.

The attack by a shoulder-fired missile was a significant new blow in an Iraq insurgency that escalated in recent days -- a "tough week," in the words of the U.S. occupation chief.

Other U.S. soldiers were reported killed Sunday in ground attacks here and elsewhere in central Iraq. The only day that saw more U.S. casualties came March 23, during the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.

Sunday's attacks came amid threats attributed to Saddam's party of a wave of violence against the U.S. occupation. Saturday had been planned as a "Day of Resistance" in Baghdad, though no widespread violence was reported there.

The aircraft was hit at about 9 a.m. and crashed amid cornfields near the village of Hasi, about 40 miles southwest of Baghdad and just south of Fallujah, a center of Sunni Muslim resistance to the U.S. occupation.

At the scene, villagers proudly showed off blackened pieces of wreckage to arriving reporters.

I have made two trips to Iraq since the end of the war and interviewed dozens of sources in Iraq and in the United States who were involved in the planning and execution of the war and its aftermath. It is becoming painfully clear that the American plan (if it can even be dignified with the name) for dealing with postwar Iraq was flawed in its conception and ineptly carried out. At the very least, the bulk of the evidence suggests that what was probably bound to be a difficult aftermath to the war was made far more difficult by blinkered vision and overoptimistic assumptions on the part of the war's greatest partisans within the Bush administration. The lack of security and order on the ground in Iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar Iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Despite administration claims, it is simply not true that no one could have predicted the chaos that ensued after the fall of Saddam Hussein. In fact, many officials in the United States, both military and civilian, as well as many Iraqi exiles, predicted quite accurately the perilous state of things that exists in Iraq today. There was ample warning, both on the basis of the specifics of Iraq and the precedent of other postwar deployments -- in Panama, Kosovo and elsewhere -- that the situation in postwar Iraq was going to be difficult and might become unmanageable. What went wrong was not that no one could know or that no one spoke out. What went wrong is that the voices of Iraq experts, of the State Department almost in its entirety and, indeed, of important segments of the uniformed military were ignored. As much as the invasion of Iraq and the rout of Saddam Hussein and his army was a triumph of planning and implementation, the mess that is postwar Iraq is a failure of planning and implementation. . . .

In Iraq today, there is a steadily increasing disconnect between what the architects of the occupation think they are accomplishing and how Iraqis on the street evaluate postwar progress. And as the security situation fails to improve, these perceptions continue to darken.

The Bush administration fiercely denies that this "alarmist" view accurately reflects Iraqi reality. It insists that the positive account it has been putting forward is the real truth and that the largely downbeat account in much of the press is both inaccurate and unduly despairing. The corner has been turned, administration officials repeat.

Whether the United States is eventually successful in Iraq (and saying the mission "has to succeed," as so many people do in Washington, is not a policy but an expression of faith), even supporters of the current approach of the Coalition Provisional Authority concede that the United States is playing catch-up in Iraq. This is largely, though obviously not entirely, because of the lack of postwar planning during the run-up to the war and the mistakes of the first 60 days after the fall of Saddam Hussein. And the more time passes, the clearer it becomes that what happened in the immediate aftermath of what the administration calls Operation Iraqi Freedom was a self-inflicted wound, a morass of our own making.

Call it liberation or occupation, a dominating American presence in Iraq was probably destined to be more difficult, and more costly in money and in blood, than administration officials claimed in the months leading up to the war. But it need not have been this difficult. Had the military been as meticulous in planning its strategy and tactics for the postwar as it was in planning its actions on the battlefield, the looting of Baghdad, with all its disastrous material and institutional and psychological consequences, might have been stopped before it got out of control. Had the collective knowledge embedded in the Future of Iraq Project been seized upon, rather than repudiated by, the Pentagon after it gained effective control of the war and postwar planning a few months before the war began, a genuine collaboration between the American authorities and Iraqis, both within the country and from the exiles, might have evolved. And had the lessons of nation-building -- its practice but also its inevitability in the wars of the 21st century -- been embraced by the Bush administration, rather than dismissed out of hand, then the opportunities that did exist in postwar Iraq would not have been squandered as, in fact, they were.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 1 ? Some American military officers in Iraq are pressing to reconstitute entire units of the former Iraqi Army, which the top United States administrator in Baghdad disbanded in May. They say the change would speed the creation of a new army and stabilize the nation. . . .

The talks are at an early stage and do not represent an actual plan. At a news conference in Baghdad on Saturday, the American administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, spoke merely of the need to welcome back former members of the Iraqi Army into the small replacement army now being formed.

But the talks tacitly acknowledge that some officers view Mr. Bremer's decision to dismantle the defeated 500,000-member Iraqi Army as a mistake, one that has contributed to the instability and increasing attacks against United States forces in Iraq.

Mr. Bremer's decision, which his advisers say was made after deliberations with senior Pentagon, White House and other administration officials, was a defining moment in the American-led occupation.

Pentagon policy makers continue to say the Iraqi military had to be dismantled before a democratic Iraq could be built, and they point out that the force had already melted away under intense attack.

But the decision reversed the approach of Mr. Bremer's predecessor, Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general who advocated paying members of the former Iraqi Army as a way to keep their units intact for possible construction tasks and to prevent them from turning against the Americans. . . .

Under one possibility described by a senior officer in Baghdad, former army transportation and engineering units might be reconstituted first. Known in the military as combat support and combat service support, such units perform important logistical missions, and the American effort in Iraq has required the mobilization of tens of thousands of reservists for those duties.

Iraqi combat units, in particular Republican Guard and tank units, would not be among those reconstituted, officers said. But armored and infantry soldiers of the former Iraqi military would be allowed to apply for retraining and membership in the new army, an effort led by Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, previously the United States Army's chief of infantry training.

The first 700-man battalion of the new Iraqi Army took the field in early October under the command of Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno of the Fourth Infantry Division, based in Tikrit.

Mr. Bremer said Saturday that about 60 percent of the enlisted soldiers and all of the sergeants in the new Iraqi Army had been members of the former army. . . .

Walter B. Slocombe, the civilian in charge of rebuilding Iraqi security institutions, defended Mr. Bremer's decision on grounds of principle and practicality. He said planting democratic roots in Iraq required disbanding an institution that was hated by the population as an instrument of Mr. Hussein's control. . . .

But Mr. Bremer's announcement contradicted the plan as described at an official Pentagon briefing on March 11, a week before General Garner's departure for Iraq.

"One of our goals is to take a good portion of the Iraqi regular army ? I'm not talking about the Republican Guards, the special Republican Guards, but I'm talking about the regular army ? and the regular army has the skill sets to match the work that needs to be done in construction," a senior Pentagon official said at the briefing.

"So our thought is to take them and they can help rebuild their own country," he said, adding that their tasks would not be combat but "things like engineering, road construction, work on bridges, remove rubble, de-mine, pick up unexploded ordnance, construction work."

Using the Iraqi army in that way, the official said, "allows us not to demobilize it immediately and put a lot of unemployed people on the street."

Mr. Bremer's decision also collided with recommendations from a group of former Iraqi military officers recruited last year by the State Department to advise the government on how to carry out the occupation.

"It was a big mistake," Muhammad al-Faour, a former major in the Iraqi Special Forces who headed the State Department project's defense working group, said in a telephone interview. "You put half a million people with their families, with their experiences, on the streets, and if just half a percent of those people turn against you, you're in trouble."

The flat tax, long a dream of economic conservatives, is finally getting its day -- not in the United States, but in Iraq.

It took L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Baghdad, no more than a stroke of the pen Sept. 15 to accomplish what eluded the likes of publisher Steve Forbes, Reps. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) and Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.), and Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) over the course of a decade and two presidential campaigns.

"The highest individual and corporate income tax rates for 2004 and subsequent years shall not exceed 15 percent," Bremer wrote in Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 37, "Tax Strategy for 2003," issued last month.

Voilà! Iraq has a flat tax, and the 15 percent rate is even lower than Forbes (17 percent) and Gramm (16 percent) favored for the United States. And, unless a future Iraqi government rescinds it, the flat tax will remain long after the Americans have left.

"It's extremely good news," said Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and a Bush administration ally. Bremer's vaguely worded edict leaves open the possibility that Iraqis could face different levels of taxation below 15 percent, but "they told me it's a flat rate and it appears as though it's a flat rate," Norquist said. The tax fighter added: "It might be a hint to the rest of us."

The military's gripes with the administration didn't grow widespread until after we'd conquered Iraq; the problems with planning, previously a matter of policy debate for top-level officers, translated into unpleasant realities for soldiers in the field. Many officers have become disenchanted with the continuing chaos in Iraq, and with the lengthening of in-country stays and the changing rotation schedules. "What I've seen throughout the officer corps is a real pendulum swing over the last three or four months, from being pro-Bush to anti-Bush," Vandergriff said. "The officers at the middle levels, who are traditionally the most Republican, are frustrated ... that there's no exit strategy," and worry that "this conflict could just drag on and on." Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who had been friendly enough with the Bush administration that he was sent last year as the president's special emissary to the Israelis and Palestinians, last month called the administration's policy a "brain fart." Says Richard Kohn, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina and a scholar of the military: "It is my belief that the Iraq war may be what forces the officer corps to return to the old George C. Marshall model of non-partisanship." . . .

"More bad news for Bush: According to a recent New York Times poll, most Americans don't think their taxes are any lower than they were three years ago. Of course, if they are not millionaires, most of them are right."

-- Senator Tom Harkin in The Boston Globe, 11/4/03

Discontented enlisted men and women have a separate set of provocations, which have been aired not only through the embedded media, but through weblogs updated and emails sent by soldiers in-country. Chief among these complaints is a widespread criticism that the military has fought this war with too few troops. The war in Iraq is already brutal enough day-to-day: Soldiers spend their days in hundred-plus degree heat, being shot at, peering anxiously into the distance, trying to pick out anyone likely to drive through a barricade with a car stuffed with explosives or whip a rifle out from under his robes and start shooting. They are facing an enemy who is not easily identifiable; when they are too aggressive, they are criticized by the press, and when they are not aggressive enough, they are reprimanded by their superiors, if they don't end up dead. In a chaotic situation like this, soldiers in-country live for the date on which they can return stateside. But many of them have seen that date pushed back, and then pushed back again, and then pushed back again. For a soldier, accustomed to regular, long-planned-for rotations, this makes the operation seem overwhelmingly open-ended-and is crushing to morale. "They feel overused, and under-appreciated, particularly in the enlisted ranks," Wilson said. Christopher Parker, a former Army captain and a political scientist at the University of California-Santa Barbara, put it to me more bluntly: "What we're seeing now is almost unprecedented, this widespread sense among people in the military that they're being jacked around." . . .

Reservists may be the tipping point. The reserves have been summoned nine times in the last 12 years, to meet American obligations around the world, after having previously been summoned only six times since World War II. Reservists who have been sent to Iraq recently have found themselves vastly under-equipped. Things have gone so badly for the reservists that many senior officers, like Helmly, expect a staffing crisis when the current tours are up. . . .

This country has 1.4 million active duty soldiers, and 1.2 million reserves. It also has 26.4 million veterans, nearly 13 percent of the nation's adult population. Politicians and activists involved in veterans affairs take it as a truism that a defining feature of veterans' politics is their perception of how the active military is being treated, and used. Subtle shifts in the way that massive population votes could obviously have far-reaching impacts in national politics.

A reassignment of less than two-hundredths of 1 percent in the military vote to the Democrats from the Republicans in Florida in 2000 would have moved that state to the Democratic column, and a similar shift of less than 5 percent in the veteran vote alone would have given Arkansas, Nevada, and New Hampshire's electoral votes to Gore, not Bush. And Pennsylvania and Ohio, expected to be crucial swing states in the next presidential election, each have more than a million veteran voters.

The Bush administration's reaction to the deaths of 16 American soldiers in the downing of a helicopter on Sunday morning was the same as it was to the suicide bombings at police stations and the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad a week earlier — and the same as it has been to every other setback the coalition has faced: insistence that there is no need for more American troops beyond the 133,000 now in Iraq.

It is part of any president's job to inspire confidence under pressure, but given the true number of troops in Iraq — actual armed soldiers doing a soldier's job — President Bush might just as well have said that there is no need for any American troops in Iraq. Because zero is the exact number of soldiers actually present at many sites that should be secured 24 hours a day.

Such is the arithmetic of an ultra-modern army. The support echelon is so large that out of the 133,000 American men and women in Iraq, no more than 56,000 are combat-trained troops available for security duties. As for the rest, there are many command posts where soldiers operate computers not guns, there are many specialized units charged with reconstruction and civil duties, and even in the actual combat formations there is a large noncombat element. The 101st Airborne Division has 270 helicopters, which alone require more than 1,000 technicians. The Fourth Infantry Division has the usual panoply of artillery, aviation and antiaircraft units that are needed in war but have little role in peacekeeping and security duties.

And even the finest soldiers must sleep and eat. Thus the number of troops on patrol at any one time is no more than 28,000 — to oversee frontiers terrorists are trying to cross, to patrol rural terrain including vast oil fields, to control inter-city roads, and to protect American and coalition facilities. Even if so few could do so much, it still leaves the question of how to police the squares, streets and alleys of Baghdad, with its six million inhabitants, not to mention Mosul with 1.7 million, Kirkuk with 800,000, and Sunni towns like Falluja, with its quarter-million restive residents.

In fact, the 28,000 American troops are now so thinly spread that they cannot reliably protect even themselves; the helicopter shot down on Sunday was taking off from an area that had not been secured, because doing so would have required hundreds of soldiers. For comparison, there are 39,000 police officers in New York City alone — and they at least know the languages of most of the inhabitants, few of whom are likely to be armed Baathist or Islamist fanatics.

The US has reportedly complained after the Israeli army destroyed wells built for civilians in Gaza by an American government aid agency.

Huge areas have been demolished by the Israelis in the Gaza Strip in recent weeks, including more than 150 homes.

The wells had just been dug by the United States Agency for International Development (USAid). A few months ago the agency announced a $20m (£12m) project to rebuild infrastructure including roads, electricity supply lines and sewers in the occupied territories.

The agency was reporting good progress. But its workers were dismayed when they turned up to finish the wells and found that their work had been destroyed. A source at the American embassy said that when USAid complained, the Israelis told them that they demolished the wells because Palestinian militants had been hiding in them.

That has been a regular claim from the Israeli military to justify demolishing houses in Gaza - but in recent weeks whole streets have been knocked down. Israel has also been accused of trying to move refugee camps away from the border with Egypt.

Spokesmen at the American embassy were careful not to criticise the Israeli army. But according to reports in the Israeli press yesterday, they were less diplomatic behind the scenes. The newspaper Ma'ariv reported that the US had threatened to stop all reconstruction work unless the Israeli army promised not to demolish anything built by the Americans.

Ladies and gentlemen, 40 years ago almost to the day an important Presidential emissary was sent abroad by a beleaguered President of the United States. The United States was facing the prospect of nuclear war. These were the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Several emissaries went to our principal allies. One of them was a tough-minded former Secretary of State, Dean Acheson whose mission was to brief President De Gaulle and to solicit French support in what could be a nuclear war involving not just the United States and the Soviet Union but the entire NATO Alliance and the Warsaw Pact.

The former Secretary of State briefed the French President and then said to him at the end of the briefing, I would now like to show you the evidence, the photographs that we have of Soviet missiles armed with nuclear weapons. The French President responded by saying, I do not wish to see the photographs. The word of the President of the United States is good enough for me. Please tell him that France stands with America.

Would any foreign leader today react the same way to an American emissary who would go abroad and say that country X is armed with weapons of mass destruction which threaten the United States? There's food for thought in that question. Fifty-three years ago, almost the same month following the Soviet-sponsored assault by North Korea on South Korea, the Soviet Union boycotted a proposed resolution in the U. N. Security Council for a collective response to that act.

That left the Soviet Union alone in opposition, stamping it as a global pariah. In the last three weeks there were two votes on the subject of the Middle East in the General Assembly of the United Nations. In one of them the vote was 133 to four. In the other one the vote was 141 to four, and the four included the United States, Israel, Marshall Islands and Micronesia.

All of our NATO allies voted with the majority including Great Britain, including the so-called new allies in Europe — in fact almost all of the EU — and Japan. I cite these events because I think they underline two very disturbing phenomena—the loss of U. S. international credibility, the growing U. S. international isolation. . . .

Since the tragedy of 9/11 which understandably shook and outraged everyone in this country, we have increasingly embraced at the highest official level what I think fairly can be called a paranoiac view of the world. Summarized in a phrase repeatedly used at the highest level, "he who is not with us is against us." I say repeatedly because actually some months ago I did a computer check to see how often it's been used at the very highest level in public statements.

The count then quite literally was 99. So it's a phrase which obviously reflects a deeply felt perception. I strongly suspect the person who uses that phrase doesn't know its historical or intellectual origins. It is a phrase popularized by Lenin when he attacked the social democrats on the grounds that they were anti-Bolshevik and therefore he who is not with us is against us and can be handled accordingly. . . .

The second condition, troubling condition, which contributes in my view to the crisis of credibility and to the state of isolation in which the United States finds itself today is due in part because that skewed view of the world is intensified by a fear that periodically verges on panic that is in itself blind. By this I mean the absence of a clearly, sharply defined perception of what is transpiring abroad regarding particularly such critically important security issues as the existence or the spread or the availability or the readiness in alien hands of weapons of mass destruction.

We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States. That failure was contributed to and was compensated for by extremist demagogy which emphasizes the worst case scenarios which stimulates fear, which induces a very simple dichotomic view of world reality. . . .

If we want to lead we have to have other countries trust us. When we speak they have to think it is the truth. This is why De Gaulle said what he did. This is what others believed us. This is why they believed us prior to the war in Iraq.

It isn't that the Norwegians or the Germans or whoever else had their own independent intelligence services. They believed us, and they no longer do. To correct that we have to have an intelligence that speaks with authority, that can be trusted, and if preemption becomes necessary can truly tell us that as a last resort preemption is necessary. Right now there's no way of knowing.

Ultimately at issue, and I end on this, is the relationship between the new requirements of security and the traditions of American idealism. We have for decades and decades played a unique role in the world because we were viewed as a society that was generally committed to certain ideals and that we were prepared to practice them at home and to defend them abroad.

Today for the first time our commitment to idealism worldwide is challenged by a sense of security vulnerability. We have to be very careful in that setting not to become self-centered, preoccupied only with ourselves and subordinate everything else in the world to an exaggerated sense of insecurity.

We are going to live in an insecure world. It cannot be avoided. We have to learn to live in it with dignity, with idealism, with steadfastness.

If defeat is an orphan, the U.S. occupation of Iraq, for which the Senate appropriated $87 billion by a voice vote on Monday, should already go down in the loss column.

By rejecting the normal option of a recorded vote, America's senators decided that they did not want to be held individually accountable for our continuing presence in Iraq. That decision speaks far louder than their decision to actually fund our forces there and the Iraqi reconstruction.

What a difference a year makes! In the fall of 2002, the administration was positively gleeful about forcing Congress to go on record to authorize the coming war, and Democrats from swing states or districts knew they voted no at their own peril.

This week no such pressure was forthcoming. Those Republicans who live by the wedge issue understand when they could die by it, too. There was simply no percentage in compelling members to vote yes on a floundering occupation that could easily grow far worse.

It's instructive, though, that opponents of the occupation weren't exactly clamoring to be recorded against it either. Only old Robert Byrd stood on the Senate floor and shouted no when the vote was taken, but Byrd has been casting recorded votes since the waning days of the Roman Republic, and it's a hard habit to break.

What was striking Monday was that Byrd's colleagues were scuttling away from all sides of this debate, and it's not hard to understand why. The administration's handling of both the war and occupation has been so deeply flawed that it has created a situation to which not only its own policy but all the existing alternatives are clearly inadequate. Bush and his neos have given us a kind of Gothic horror version of Goldilocks, in which the policy alternatives are either too big or too small, while their own is just wrong.

A decision by the House Republicans to strip the Iraq supplemental bill of an anti-profiteering provision has outraged the Democrats.

Some Democrats have accused the White House of pulling the strings on the effort to nix the language.

“The White House and House GOP leadership didn’t want [the provision] in there,” charged Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), an author of the language.

The provision — included during the Senate Appropriations Committee markup with unanimous support but removed in conference — would have subjected those who deliberately defrauded the United States or Iraq to jail terms of up to 20 years and costly fines.

Leahy said that, privately, some Republicans told him they though it was a good provision.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), another author of the profiteering provision, called it “shocking” that it was taken out. “Why?” Feinstein asked. “It was a good amendment.”

A Senate Democratic aide said, “Several House Republican conferees were clearly empathetic, but they had to look to a higher authority. That higher authority was the White House, which had sent the marching order to strip this from the bill.”

Another Democratic aide said that “the White House got to House Republicans.” The aide pointed to Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner’s (R-Wis.) support for the provision — the lawmaker chairs the authorizing committee but was not a member of the conference — and the unwillingness of House Republicans to compromise on the language as evidence that the top White House staff may have given the marching orders.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 — As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal.

Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman that they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, and they offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct an independent search. The businessman said in an interview that the Iraqis also offered to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 who was being held in Baghdad. At one point, he said, the Iraqis pledged to hold elections.

The messages from Baghdad, first relayed in February to an analyst in the office of Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy and planning, were part of an attempt by Iraqi intelligence officers to open last-ditch negotiations with the Bush administration through a clandestine communications channel, according to people involved.

The efforts were portrayed by Iraqi officials as having the approval of President Saddam Hussein, according to interviews and documents.

The overtures, after a decade of evasions and deceptions by Iraq and a number of other attempts to broker last-minute meetings with American officials, were ultimately rebuffed. But the messages raised enough interest that in early March, Richard N. Perle, an influential adviser to top Pentagon officials, met in London with the Lebanese-American businessman, Imad Hage.

According to both men, Mr. Hage laid out the Iraqis' position to Mr. Perle, and he pressed the Iraqi request for a direct meeting with Mr. Perle or another representative of the United States.

"I was dubious that this would work," said Mr. Perle, widely recognized as an intellectual architect of the Bush administration's hawkish policy toward Iraq, "but I agreed to talk to people in Washington."

Mr. Perle said he sought authorization from C.I.A. officials to meet with the Iraqis, but the officials told him they did not want to pursue this channel, and they indicated they had already engaged in separate contacts with Baghdad. Mr. Perle said the response was simple: "The message was, `Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad.' "

A senior United States intelligence official said this was one of several contacts with Iraqis or with people who said they were trying to broker meetings on their behalf. "These signals came via a broad range of foreign intelligence services, other governments, third parties, charlatans and independent actors," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Every lead that was at all plausible, and some that weren't, were followed up."

There were a variety of efforts, both public and discreet, to avert a war in Iraq, but Mr. Hage's back channel appears to have been a final attempt by Mr. Hussein's government to communicate directly with United States officials.

In interviews in Beirut, Mr. Hage said the Iraqis appeared intimidated by the American military threat. "The Iraqis were finally taking it seriously," he said, "and they wanted to talk, and they offered things they never would have offered if the build-up hadn't occurred."

Imagine how different the U.S. position in Iraq would look to the world, to the American people and to the Arabs if President Bush could say, "Iraqis are now writing their own constitution, which will be the basis for elections, and we are in Iraq protecting that process until it's completed."

That is something Americans can understand and be proud of, and that is something that will make clear to the whole world that those people killing Iraqis and Americans today are really trying to kill the first popularly based constitution-writing process in the Arab world.

But hey, you ask, "I thought that was what we were doing?" It is what we were doing, but the process got so bogged down, and the Baathist resistance so heated up, that it now looks as if we have only a military process in Iraq and no political process.

The reason this happened is that the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, which is supposed to come up with a plan for forming the constitution-writing committee, is becoming dysfunctional. Several key G.C. members, particularly the Pentagon's favorite son, Ahmad Chalabi, have been absent from Iraq for weeks. Only seven or eight of the 24 G.C. members show up at meetings anymore.

The U.S. administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, needs to lock the 24 members of the G.C. in a room and not let them out until they produce a workable process for electing or appointing a constitution-writing committee. If they will not do that, then they should be bypassed and their powers devolved (which is happening anyway) onto the Iraqi cabinet. The one good thing the G.C. did was to appoint a 25-person Iraqi cabinet — and two-thirds of them have Ph.D.'s in their areas of expertise. Some ministers are probably corrupt and less than competent, but a majority has proved to be quite capable.

In a speech that redefined the U.S. agenda in the Middle East, President Bush waxed eloquent yesterday about his dream of democracy coexisting with Islam and transforming an important geostrategic region that has defiantly held out against the global tide of political change.

But Bush failed to acknowledge the tough realities that are likely to limit significant political progress in the near future: the United States' all-consuming commitment to fighting a global war on terrorism and confronting Islamic militancy. Washington still relies heavily on alliances with autocratic governments to achieve these top priorities.

The president's vision was an attempt to wrap together major U.S. goals in the Islamic world -- new governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, an Arab-Israeli peace, as well as political and economic openings in a wide swath of countries from North Africa to South Asia -- under the wider rubric of promoting democracy. Bush pledged new momentum to foster broad change comparable to the end of communism in Eastern Europe.

"The United States has adopted a new policy: a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results," he vowed in a speech marking the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy.

The speech was clearly aimed at putting troubled Iraq into a more acceptable context for a domestic audience alarmed by the mounting attacks and the now daily troop deaths there. But for a foreign audience, the president did send an important new signal by criticizing decades of Western inaction in the Middle East.

"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty," Bush said. "As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo."

In an unusual move, the president even cited key allies, notably Egypt, that should foster greater change. . . .

In a broad assessment of the region, the president inflated the progress toward democracy made by allies such as Saudi Arabia that are harshly criticized for their abuses in the annual U.S. human rights report, while he criticized countries such as Iran that have made some inroads but do not have good relations with Washington.

"His portrayal of what's going on in Arab countries is totally unrealistic," said Marina Ottaway, co-director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"The reality that he is overlooking is that in all these countries that are supposedly making progress, hostility to the United States is at an all-time high," she said. "So the idea that these are countries where progress on democracy is going to make them better allies is certainly not supported by what is going on."

Which country do you think is the greatest threat to world security? If you named any member of the "axis of evil" -- a nuclear-armed North Korea, a terrorist-sponsoring Iran or a lawless Iraq -- you’d have come close to our friends across the Atlantic. According to a European Union poll of more than 7,500 Europeans, more than half (some 52 per cent) placed the founding members of the so-called axis close to the top of their list of threats to the planet.

Only they added a couple of nations to join the ranks of the world’s greatest evildoers. Precisely the same number of Europeans said America was a threat to world peace, ranking the Bush administration alongside Kim Jong Il’s tyranny in Pyongyang and the hard-line theocracy of Tehran.

In fact, the United States was only beaten into joint second place by a country that has never sponsored terrorist attacks on European soil. A staggering 59 per cent of this huge poll -- released this week -- placed Israel at the top of the list of world threats. That was 22 points ahead of Syria, 23 points ahead of Libya and Saudi Arabia, and 43 points ahead of Somalia.

The Bush administration runs the risk of a total collapse in political support in Europe. And like all political problems, it needs to think quickly and creatively if it wants European help to deal with a wide range of security and economic challenges around the world.

Take the problem of rebuilding Iraq. One of the biggest disappointments at the recent Madrid conference on Iraq was the meager sum offered by the European Union countries. The E.U. and its members gave pledges of around $800 million, while France and Germany offered nothing on their own. Small wonder when you consider that two thirds of Europeans believe the United States should pay for the rebuilding of Iraq.

Yet like all good domestic polls, the E.U. numbers offer a way out. The majority of Europeans -- by a margin of 54 to 45 per cent -- want to see their own countries donating cash to the new Iraq. That suggests there’s more room for lobbying at the United Nations, and more work to be done in European capitals. And it might just mean campaigning on different grounds. Instead of asking for money for reconstruction, call it humanitarian aid. A vast majority -- 82 per cent -- of Europeans support an increase in such aid to Iraq.

The Bush White House, irritated by pesky questions from congressional Democrats about how the administration is using taxpayer money, has developed an efficient solution: It will not entertain any more questions from opposition lawmakers.

The decision -- one that Democrats and scholars said is highly unusual -- was announced in an e-mail sent Wednesday to the staff of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. House committee Democrats had just asked for information about how much the White House spent making and installing the "Mission Accomplished" banner for President Bush's May 1 speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.

The director of the White House Office of Administration, Timothy A. Campen, sent an e-mail titled "congressional questions" to majority and minority staff on the House and Senate Appropriations panels. Expressing "the need to add a bit of structure to the Q&A process," he wrote: "Given the increase in the number and types of requests we are beginning to receive from the House and Senate, and in deference to the various committee chairmen and our desire to better coordinate these requests, I am asking that all requests for information and materials be coordinated through the committee chairmen and be put in writing from the committee."

He said this would limit "duplicate requests" and help answer questions "in a timely fashion."

It would also do another thing: prevent Democrats from getting questions answered without the blessing of the GOP committee chairmen.

"It's saying we're not going to allow the opposition party to ask questions about the way we use tax money," said R. Scott Lilly, Democratic staff director for the House committee. "As far as I know, this is without modern precedent."

Norman Ornstein, a congressional specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed. "I have not heard of anything like that happening before," he said. "This is obviously an excuse to avoid providing information about some of the things the Democrats are asking for."

Angry about a leaked Democratic memo, the Republican leadership of the Senate yesterday took the unusual step of canceling all business of the committee investigating prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) called on the author of the memo -- which laid out a possible Democratic strategy to extend the investigation to include the White House and executive branch -- to "identify himself or herself . . . disavow this partisan attack in its entirety" and deliver "a personal apology" to Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence.

Only if those steps are taken, Frist said, "will it be possible for the committee to resume its work in an effective and bipartisan manner -- a manner deserving of the confidence of other members of the Senate and the executive branch."

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), the committee's ranking Democrat, said he was "really disappointed" with the Republican action. "Whose advantage is it to derail asking the tough questions on prewar intelligence and the use and misuse of it?" he asked.

The GOP move follows a month of extraordinary maneuvering by Democrats and Republicans to take political advantage of the committee's look at how the intelligence community collected and analyzed intelligence on Iraq over the past decade.

Rockefeller, prodded by the Democratic leadership, did not want the blame for any exaggerations of the threat posed by Iraq to rest largely with the CIA; instead he wanted the panel to investigate the separate question of how the administration used the information it was given.

The memo that set off yesterday's events was written by a committee Democratic staff aide and laid out for Rockefeller possible steps that could be taken by Democrats to press their approach. It also proposed publicizing any limitations the Republican majority put on the inquiry and exposing what it termed "the senior administration officials who made the case for a unilateral, preemptive war."

Rockefeller has said he did not share the memo with other Democrats on the committee or with the Senate leadership.

Yesterday, Frist appeared to close the door entirely on the Democrats' wishes. After discussions with Roberts, the majority leader said that "the committee's review is nearly complete" and "we have jointly determined the committee can and will complete its review this year."

"They can't do that," Rockefeller said, noting that hundreds of pages of requested documents have recently been promised by the State Department and Pentagon and more interviews have been scheduled.

In addition, he noted that the final report from David Kay, who heads the CIA's search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has not been completed. "What can we say about prewar intelligence without Kay's report?" Rockefeller asked.

I am convinced we have one last chance to bring the world into Iraq. It would require a genuine U-turn away from the unilateral model we've been following for securing and rebuilding Iraq. But participating should be in Europe's own interest and in the interest of Iraq's neighbors, because a failed state in the heart of the Middle East threatens their security as much or more than ours. President Bush should call a summit, go to Europe, and ask for more help. We'd have to give up some authority to get it, but Iraq is no prize, and we ought to be happy to share the burden of building peace. The president should propose three initiatives to bring more countries on board.

First, we should make Iraq a NATO mission, and "double hat" Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, by putting him in charge of a new NATO command for the region. More countries would take part, because they would be reporting to the North Atlantic Council, not the Pentagon. But the United States would retain operational control on the ground with Gen. Abizaid as head of the new NATO command.

Second, we should create a high commissioner for Iraq who reports to an international board of directors of which the United States would be chairman. The high commissioner could be a leading international figure or the head of the Iraqi reconstruction effort, Paul Bremer, wearing dual hats like Abizaid.

The recent donors conference in Madrid is a painful example of the price we pay for doing everything ourselves. Typically, as in the Balkans, the United States covers about 25 percent of reconstruction costs after a major conflict. By that ratio, the $18.7 billion Congress just approved for Iraq's reconstruction should have generated about $60 billion from the rest of the world. Instead we got $13 billion, of which $9 billion was loans. As long as the Coalition Provisional Authority is the primary body making decisions for how Iraq will be rebuilt, other countries will be reluctant to fork over real money. They want a true say in how it will be spent.

Third, we should transform the Iraqi Governing Council into a provisional government, with greater sovereign powers, and make it an institution that better represents Iraq's constituencies. This transfer of authority should not be held hostage to the complicated and time-consuming process of writing a new constitution. Nothing would send a clearer message to the Iraqi people that the future is theirs to build and to inherit. And nothing would make it clearer to them that the Saddam Hussein loyalists and international terrorists killing our troops and Iraqi citizens are also trying to destroy their future.

Increasingly alarmed by the failure of Iraq's Governing Council to take decisive action, the Bush administration is developing possible alternatives to the council to ensure that the United States can turn over political power at the same time and pace that troops are withdrawn, according to senior U.S. officials here and in Baghdad.

The United States is deeply frustrated with its hand-picked council members because they have spent more time on their own political or economic interests than in planning for Iraq's political future, especially selecting a committee to write a new constitution, the officials added. "We're unhappy with all of them. They're not acting as a legislative or governing body, and we need to get moving," said a well-placed U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "They just don't make decisions when they need to."

Ambassador Robert Blackwill, the new National Security Council official overseeing Iraq's political transition, begins an unannounced trip this weekend to Iraq to meet with Iraqi politicians to drive home that point. He is also discussing U.S. options with L. Paul Bremer, civilian administrator of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, U.S. officials said.

The United States is even considering a French proposal, earlier rejected, to create an interim Iraqi leadership that would emulate the Afghanistan model, according to U.S. and French officials. During the debate before the new United Nations resolution on postwar Iraq was passed Oct. 17, France and other Security Council members had proposed holding a national conference -- like the Afghan loya jirga -- to select a provisional government that would have the rights of sovereignty.

Among several options, the administration is also considering changing the order of the transition if it looks as though it could drag on much longer than the United States had planned. The United States has long insisted that a new constitution was the essential first step and elections the final phase in handing over power.

But now U.S. officials are exploring the possibility, again backed by other Security Council members, of creating a provisional government with effective sovereignty to govern until a new constitution is written and elections held. This is again similar to Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai has governed while a new national charter is written. Elections are scheduled there next June, two years after the fall of the Taliban.

"If our exit is going to take longer, if it looks like it could go more than two years to get it all done, then there's an incentive to look into a transitional phase and some other governing mechanism," a State Department official said.

The move comes after repeated warnings to the Iraqi body. Two weeks ago, Bremer met with the council and bluntly told members that they "can't go on like this," a senior U.S. official in Baghdad said. Bremer noted that at least half the council is out of the country at any given time and that at some meetings, only four or five members showed up.

Since the council appointed 25 cabinet ministers in late August, the body has done "nothing of substance," the U.S. official in Baghdad added. The council has been seriously remiss in oversight of its own ministers, holding public hearings, setting policy for cabinet departments and even communicating with cabinet members, he said.

The United States, which financially and politically backed several of the council members when they were in exile, has also been disillusioned by the council's inability to communicate with the Iraqi public or gain greater legitimacy. The senior official in Baghdad called the council "inept" at outreach to its own people.

As a result, the council has less credibility today than it did when it was appointed, which has further undermined Iraq's stability, U.S. officials here and in Baghdad said.

The indictment of three current and former Clark County and Las Vegas officials in connection with a probe of alleged kickbacks from a strip-club owner would be a fairly routine story - a lucrative activity lots of people in government want to regulate heavily, which almost always leads to opportunities for corruption - but for one detail.

As the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported, the FBI used the USA Patriot Act to seize financial records of nightclub owner Michael Galardi and others.

Wait a minute. Didn't the administration say, shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, that this act was needed to give the government more tools to go after terrorists or plots that threatened the lives of innocent Americans? Why invoke it in a relatively simple and localized case of alleged municipal corruption?

Well, it seems that Sec. 314 of the act allows federal investigators to obtain information from any financial institution regarding the accounts of people "engaged in or reasonably suspected, based on credible evidence, of engaging in terrorist acts or money-laundering activities." Not money-laundering in connection with terrorism but any money-laundering.

Nevada's Democratic U.S. Sen. Harry Reid is outraged. "The law was intended for activities related to terrorism and not to naked women," he told the Review-Journal. Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley said, "It was never my intention that the Patriot Act be used for garden-variety crimes and investigations."

Maybe the legislators didn't intend it that way. But the act was written broadly. We have heard U.S. attorneys acknowledge that it included powers they have long sought for ordinary criminal investigations as well as terrorist-related inquiries.

Those who insist that the lawmakers who passed it were well aware of this, however, are not quite correct. The bill was passed in haste. The final draft in its complete form - it had been cobbled together from Clinton-era proposals Republicans had rejected as dangerously enhancing federal power - was not available to most lawmakers at the time they voted on it in October 2001. That may reflect poorly on our elected representatives, but that's what happened.

All this strengthens the case for letting parts of the Patriot Act expire in 2005, when they are scheduled to do so. It is dubious whether federal authorities needed to be involved in a local corruption case at all. And law enforcement already has tools to go after corruption.

As for terrorism, the emerging evidence suggests that the biggest problem in pursuing suspects is overlapping bureaucracies that don't share information, or bureaucracies that are too big and sclerotic to operate efficiently and let terrorists slip through surveillance nets. America needs to reform federal law enforcement in the direction of leanness and efficiency rather than giving more power to agencies that don't know how to properly use the power they have.

The breaking story about efforts by Iraq's Baathist regime to avoid U.S. invasion and occupation reveals a scandal greater than those which have preceded it: those involving lies about the war's motives, vindictive treatment towards those telling the truth about it, and pathetic efforts to prettify what is in fact a wholesale bloody disaster. Four recent articles, in the New York Times, Knight-Ridder Newspapers, Guardian, and by ABC News, while containing some slightly contradictory information, inform us that the Bush administration was so hell-bent on attacking Iraq (for reasons bearing no relation to the stated casus belli) that it not only mislead the American people, but resisted the abjectly humiliating efforts of Iraqi authorities to comply with almost all stated U.S. demands. The only demands Baghdad did not and could not concede to were those for "regime change" (which international law does not recognize as a grounds for war) and for the surrender of the Iraqi military to American forces even without a fight.

Over the four months before the coalition forces invaded Iraq, Saddam's government made a series of increasingly desperate offers to the United States. In December, the Iraqi intelligence services approached Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-terrorism, with an offer to prove that Iraq was not linked to the September 11 attacks, and to permit several thousand US troops to enter the country to look for weapons of mass destruction. If the object was regime change, then Saddam, the agents claimed, was prepared to submit himself to internationally monitored elections within two years. According to Mr Cannistraro, these proposals reached the White House, but were "turned down by the president and vice-president".

By February, Saddam's negotiators were offering almost everything the US government could wish for: free access to the FBI to look for weapons of mass destruction wherever it wanted, support for the US position on Israel and Palestine, even rights over Iraq's oil. Among the people they contacted was Richard Perle, the security adviser who for years had been urging a war with Iraq. He passed their offers to the CIA. Last week he told the New York Times that the CIA had replied: "Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad".

Saddam Hussein, in other words, appears to have done everything possible to find a diplomatic alternative to the impending war, and the US government appears to have done everything necessary to prevent one. This is the opposite to what we were told by George Bush and Tony Blair. On March 6, 13 days before the war began, Bush said to journalists: "I want to remind you that it's his choice to make as to whether or not we go to war. It's Saddam's choice. He's the person that can make the choice of war and peace. Thus far, he's made the wrong choice."

Ten days later, Blair told a press conference: "We have provided the right diplomatic way through this, which is to lay down a clear ultimatum to Saddam: cooperate or face disarmament by force... all the way through we have tried to provide a diplomatic solution." On March 17, Bush claimed that "should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war". All these statements are false.

NEW YORK -- George Soros, one of the world's richest men, has given away nearly $5 billion to promote democracy in the former Soviet bloc, Africa and Asia. Now he has a new project: defeating President Bush.

"It is the central focus of my life," Soros said, his blue eyes settled on an unseen target. The 2004 presidential race, he said in an interview, is "a matter of life and death."

Soros, who has financed efforts to promote open societies in more than 50 countries around the world, is bringing the fight home, he said. On Monday, he and a partner committed up to $5 million to MoveOn.org, a liberal activist group, bringing to $15.5 million the total of his personal contributions to oust Bush.

Overnight, Soros, 74, has become the major financial player of the left. He has elicited cries of foul play from the right. And with a tight nod, he pledged: "If necessary, I would give more money."

"America, under Bush, is a danger to the world," Soros said. Then he smiled: "And I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is."

Soros believes that a "supremacist ideology" guides this White House. He hears echoes in its rhetoric of his childhood in occupied Hungary. "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans." It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit ("The enemy is listening"). "My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me," he said in a soft Hungarian accent. . . .

In past election cycles, Soros contributed relatively modest sums. In 2000, his aide said, he gave $122,000, mostly to Democratic causes and candidates. But recently, Soros has grown alarmed at the influence of neoconservatives, whom he calls "a bunch of extremists guided by a crude form of social Darwinism."

Neoconservatives, Soros said, are exploiting the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a preexisting agenda of preemptive war and world dominion. "Bush feels that on September 11th he was anointed by God," Soros said. "He's leading the U.S. and the world toward a vicious circle of escalating violence." . . .

Soros will continue to recruit wealthy donors for his campaign. Having put a lot of money into the war of ideas around the world, he has learned that "money buys talent; you can advocate more effectively."

At his home in Westchester, N.Y., he raised $115,000 for Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean. He also supports Democratic presidential contenders Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.). . . .

Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, which promotes changes in campaign finance , has benefited from Soros's grants over the years. Soros has backed altering campaign finance, an aide said, donating close to $18 million over the past seven years.

"There's some irony, given the supporting role he played in helping to end the soft money system," Wertheimer said. "I'm sorry that Mr. Soros has decided to put so much money into a political effort to defeat a candidate. We will be watchdogging him closely."

An aide said Soros welcomes the scrutiny. Soros has become as rich as he has, the aide said, because he has a preternatural instinct for a good deal.

Asked whether he would trade his $7 billion fortune to unseat Bush, Soros opened his mouth. Then he closed it. The proposal hung in the air: Would he become poor to beat Bush?

He said, "If someone guaranteed it."

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 — The World Trade Organization ruled on Monday that steel tariffs imposed by President Bush last year were illegal, clearing the way for the European Union to impose more than $2 billion of sanctions on imports from the United States unless Washington quickly drops the duties.

The final decision by a W.T.O. panel, which was widely anticipated and has been discussed for weeks at the White House, puts Mr. Bush in a difficult spot. As an election looms, he must choose between continuing to help the steel industry — which could bolster his electoral prospects in crucial industrial states — or respecting international trade laws and increasing his chances of winning new regional and global trade agreements.

Lifting the tariffs would also please American automakers and other steel-consuming industries, which have complained that the tariffs have increased their costs.

The European Union has made the president's decision more difficult by aiming its proposed sanctions at products in states considered pivotal in the 2004 election — threatening, for example, to impose tariffs on citrus fruit imported from Florida.

Administration officials said President Bush had not decided whether to lift the temporary tariffs, which increase the cost of imported steel by as much as 30 percent and were meant to give the ailing steel industry a three-year respite from international competition.

But the W.T.O. panel ruled that the American tariffs went beyond the rules allowing countries to protect themselves against sudden surges of imports. Monday's decision upheld an original W.T.O. ruling in March on complaints brought by the European Union.

Europe issued a joint statement with Japan, South Korea, Norway, Switzerland, China, New Zealand and Brazil, saying they all welcomed the decision. Those other countries could also now seek to impose sanctions on American imports if the steel tariffs are not removed.

The war on Iraq and its aftermath exacted a heavy toll on combatants and civilians, who paid and continue to pay the price in death, injury and mental and physical ill health. Between 21,700 and 55,000 people died between March 20 and October 20, 2003 (the date on which this report went to press), while the health and environmental consequences of the conflict will be felt for many years to come.

"What we see is increasing evidence that we are facing an enemy that has a strategy," says Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University and a former Army colonel. "This is careful planning of the thoughtful, logical use of violence in order to achieve the enemy's objective."

Insurgents hope to foster a sense of insecurity in Iraq and shake resolve in the United States.

"The center of gravity in this war is not the (U.S.) military force, to defeat it, but rather the people of Iraq and the people of the United States," says Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "There is no way the Iraqi insurgents can physically force the U.S. military to leave. What they've got to do is convince the American people it is not worth it to sustain the military presence."

Krepinevich says the insurgents will know that they have lost the war when the Iraqi people "feel confident enough to actively support the coalition and provide intelligence." That is why the insurgents "exact retribution on any Iraqi that seems to support the coalition," he says.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 11 — Stung by the deaths of nearly 40 American soldiers over the past 10 days, the top American military commander in Iraq spoke of a "turning point" in the conflict on Tuesday and outlined a new get-tough approach to combat operations in areas north and west of Baghdad, strongholds for loyalists of Saddam Hussein.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said operations would be stepped up against shadowy groups behind the increasing tempo of attacks on American troops in the Iraqi heartland between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Those groups have been mounting ambushes, triggering roadside bombs and shooting down American helicopters. He confirmed that the Black Hawk that crashed Friday, killing six soldiers, had been shot down; a missile strike on a Chinook on Nov. 2 left 16 dead.

"We are taking the fight into the safe havens of the enemy in the heartland of the country where we continue to face former regime loyalists, criminals and foreign terrorists, who are trying to isolate the coalition forces from the Iraqi people and break the will of the international community," General Sanchez told a heavily guarded news conference in the Iraqi capital. He added, "They will fail."

Hours after he spoke, the attackers struck anew with two mortars that were fired at midevening into the so-called green zone, the fortified area of central Baghdad where General Sanchez and top American civilian officials have their headquarters. A third mortar shell struck in an unfortified area to the south of the headquarters in what was Mr. Hussein's Republican Palace, but an American military spokesman said that the volley that struck in the palace complex had caused no damage, and that there were no reports of casualties.

Dispensing with euphemisms favored by many Bush administration officials in recent months, General Sanchez, commander of the 130,000 American troops in Iraq, described what they were facing as a war. . . .

Aides to General Sanchez said the choice of the word "war" was part of a conscious effort by senior military officers to inject realism into debates in Washington. American officials disclosed Tuesday that the chief American administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, had left abruptly for talks in Washington.

General Sanchez confirmed another setback for American forces: that the American-appointed mayor of Sadr City, a Baghdad suburb of about two million Shiite Muslims, had been killed Sunday. The general said the mayor, Muhanad al-Kaadi, had tried to drive into an area forbidden to vehicles, then had engaged in a "wrestling match" with an American soldier during which the soldier's gun had gone off, inflicting fatal leg wounds on the mayor.

"It was a very unfortunate incident," the general said, adding that it was under investigation.

On another issue with American political overtones, General Sanchez said interrogations of 20 people suspected of links to Al Qaeda had failed to confirm such links. . . .

The general described a stark picture of the attacks on American troops, saying they averaged six a day when he took command five months ago, rose to "the teens" 60 days ago, and had increased to 30 to 35 a day in the last 30 days. He predicted that the attacks would increase still further before the intensifying American military campaign began to curb them, an outcome he said was not in doubt.

The abrupt recall of America's top administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer III, for two days of urgent White House consultations signals a new level of alarm among American policy makers. Anxieties in Washington surely deepened yesterday after the bombing of an Italian military police compound killed at least 17 Italians and 9 Iraqis.

Administration officials, from President Bush on down, have been pressing Mr. Bremer to speed the transfer of sovereignty to appointed Iraqi officials and to compress, radically, the one- to two-year timetable he drew up for holding elections. There is some merit in these suggestions. We have long called for a quicker transfer of real power to Iraqis, as have most of America's allies. What is troubling, however, is the notion of short-circuiting the time necessary to draw up a workable constitution and conduct fair elections in a country as torn and troubled as Iraq. Such thinking suggests that the Bush administration is in such a rush to bring American troops home that it has lost interest in laying the foundations for a stable democracy.

The White House recently began shifting its case for the Iraq war from the embarrassing unconventional weapons issue to the lofty vision of creating an exemplary democracy in Iraq. Mr. Bush would look breathtakingly cynical if he seemed to be rushing the preparation for real elections with an eye toward improving his own re-election chances.

A much better way to manage the process would be to transfer political authority to a newly created United Nations administration. Constitutional development and election supervision are areas where the U.N. has built-in legitimacy and experience. Creating a U.N. administration for Iraq could also help attract more international peacekeeping troops to relieve America's overstrained forces — a need made even more urgent by yesterday's attack on the Italians. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has never had much support at home for keeping troops in Iraq and may now face calls for withdrawing the more than 2,000 Italians in Iraq.

The grim truth is that there are no very attractive options in Iraq. The administration would clearly love to be able to remove American troops from the line of fire. So would we. Yet a rushed American withdrawal without an orderly handoff to the U.N. would leave Iraq open to just the kind of mixture of misgovernment and terrorism that the White House waged this war to prevent.

The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.

The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.

One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.

An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".

"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.

"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."

Although, the report was an internal CIA document it was widely circulated within the administration. Even more unusually, it carried an endorsement by Paul Bremer, the civilian head of the US-run occupation of Iraq - a possible sign that he was seeking to bypass his superiors in the Pentagon and send a message directly to President George Bush on how bad the situation has become.

Amid new attacks on U.S. forces and allies, a classified CIA assessment has concluded that the anti-U.S. insurgency is gaining support by the day and threatening to spread beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle area to other parts of the country.

Yesterday's deadly car bomb attack on Italian peacekeeping forces would seem to confirm that fear, since it took place outside the Sunni Triangle in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah.

The CIA assessment, which was described by intelligence sources and first reported yesterday by the Philadelphia Inquirer, cited two key reasons for the growth of the insurgency: the failure thus far of U.S. forces to crush it and the lack of a recognized and authentic Iraqi political authority.

U.S. forces in Iraq are attempting to deal with the first problem by stepping up military operations against insurgents. And the Bush administration is now considering coping with the second by taking a step it publicly rejected as recently as two months ago: transferring power to an interim Iraqi government and leader in advance of a new constitution and elections. . . .

[Paul] Bremer characterized the current military situation in Iraq as "a low-intensity conflict." He expressed uncertainty about the CIA conclusion that Iraqi support for the U.S. occupation was fading, saying, "I think the situation with the Iraqi public is, frankly, not easy to quantify."

But two U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the CIA assessment said Bremer had endorsed it before it was sent to Washington. One source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the findings of the assessment were deliberately leaked to the news media to circumvent officials with a more optimistic view of the Iraqi occupation who might try to keep it from Bush. The source said Bush had read the report.

The report concluded that Iraqis were increasingly supportive of the insurgency in both active and passive ways. It said the insurgents' ranks were being swelled by foreign Islamic radicals, but that direction was firmly in the hands of Iraqi military and intelligence officials from Saddam Hussein's regime. A separate Pentagon estimate said as many as 50,000 people may be part of the insurgency.

The CIA assessment said the political situation is turbulent because Iraqi Sunnis see themselves as potential losers given that they are a minority and can be outvoted in elections, while the majority Shia - once content to wait for elections - are increasingly split among themselves and less patient.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 — The Bush administration, moving up its timetable for self-government in Iraq and yielding to its own handpicked leadership there, has decided to try to hold elections in the first half of next year and turn civilian authority over to a temporary government before a new constitution is written, administration officials said Wednesday.

Increasing attacks on American and other foreign forces forced a rethinking of the administration's approach in recent days, the officials said, lending more urgency to the need for Iraqi self-rule by the middle of next year.

The new plan — a two-step process — was intended in part, they said, to change the political climate in Iraq and reduce the anger toward occupying forces that fosters support for violence, including attacks on American and other foreign forces, by demonstrating to Iraqis that the United States is moving more quickly to establish self-rule. . . .

Until recently, American policy was to have the current Iraqi Governing Council decide how to write a constitution. In its latest resolution, the United Nations Security Council called on the Governing Council to decide on such a process by Dec. 15.

But lately, the council told Mr. Bremer that the only way the writing of a constitution would be seen as legitimate was if the delegates were elected.

Elections have been demanded by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shiite religious leader. Experts assume that Shiites, who predominate in Iraq, would win a commanding majority of seats in any election.

Ayatollah Sistani's demand stirred fears among some American officials that an elected constitution-writing body might write a theocratic charter that enshrined Islam as a state religion and marginalized the Sunni minority, potentially aggravating the violent rebellion of remnants loyal to Saddam Hussein.

Ayatollah Sistani has kept his distance from the occupation forces, but administration officials said council members have tried to suggest alternatives to him, like having the convention chosen by some amalgam of elections, provincial councils, town meetings, local caucuses and the like. But he has rejected the proposals, the officials said.

"Sistani has enormous weight," an administration official said. "We have to heed what the Iraqis are telling us on this." . . .

Mr. Bush, officials said, was impressed with the argument that writing a constitution would take a long time. "The president agreed that we couldn't wait for a constitution to be written," said one official. "The system can't handle it."

The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks reached an agreement with the White House yesterday to gain restricted access to years of classified presidential briefings, which had been the focus of subpoena threats from the panel's chairman.

The compromise will allow the 10-member commission to create a four-person subcommittee that will have varying degrees of access to the documents known as Presidential Daily Briefs from the Bush and Clinton administrations, according to a commission statement and sources familiar with the agreement.

But the accord also includes restrictions limiting what parts of the briefings can be seen and what parts can later be shared with the rest of the bipartisan panel, and it includes White House review of much of that information, sources familiar with the agreement said. Those with direct access will take notes, and those notes are subject to review by the White House before being shared with others, sources said.

The limitations prompted angry condemnations yesterday from two Democratic commissioners -- former senator Max Cleland (Ga.) and former representative Timothy J. Roemer (Ind.) -- who have argued that the commission should be more aggressive in seeking sensitive materials from the Bush administration.

Cleland called the agreement "unconscionable" and said it "was deliberately compromised by the president of the United States" to limit the commission's work.

"If this decision stands, I, as a member of the commission, cannot look any American in the eye, especially family members of victims, and say the commission had full access," Cleland said. "This investigation is now compromised. . . . This is 'The Gong Show'; this isn't protection of national security."

Roemer said: "To paraphrase Churchill, never have so few commissioners reviewed such important documents with so many restrictions. The 10 commissioners should either have access to this or not at all."

But Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor and another Democrat on the panel, said the deal was a "compromise that respects the integrity and independence of the commission."

"It is not perfect, but this will provide the commission with sufficient access," Ben-Veniste said. . . .

The bipartisan Sept. 11 commission, created by Congress more than a year ago after months of resistance from the White House, has been seriously hobbled by ongoing battles with the Bush administration over access to documents. In the past month, the panel has issued subpoenas to the Defense Department and the Federal Aviation Administration for materials related to air defense on the day of the attacks.

But the commission balked at a proposal by Roemer last week to subpoena the presidential documents, which include an Aug. 6, 2001, briefing outlining possible attacks by the al Qaeda network. The commission's chairman, former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean (R), had warned two weeks earlier that the commission was considering subpoenas targeting the White House.

It's nearly 1:30 in the morning, and a group of bleary-eyed young boys and girls -- who by now should be asleep, dreaming of rocket ships and ponies -- have found themselves in the presumably baffling circumstance of being lined up for a press conference in the U.S. Capitol. They file into a rank-smelling meeting room just a few yards from the Senate floor, where a classic exercise in Washington Kabuki theatre is underway. Republicans are staging a marathon 30-hour debate to protest Democratic filibusters of four conservative judicial nominees. The meeting room, normally reserved for private GOP strategy sessions, has been transformed into a bustling propaganda center for the pro-judge forces. Inside, activists wear dark blue "Justice For Judges Marathon" T-shirts. The room stinks horribly of people, coffee, and decaying munchies.

At the far end of the room is a large, flat-screen television tuned to the main event. Currently on the floor is South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. Graham flaps his arms and points to various charts. But no one pays any attention. In fact, the sound's not even on. Which is telling. The point of all this is not anything that will be said or done on the floor; there are sure to be no surprises. The Democrats are dug in, and there's no hope of actually confirming any judges. So the point is ... well, the point is to make a point. Particularly one that will please conservative activists steamed that Senate Republicans can't simply crush the hated Daschle Democrats.

The children, perhaps 20 of them, line up behind a lectern. Above them hangs a TV-friendly sign reading: "Fair Up or Down Vote." Through a door comes Graham, and the room bursts into loud applause. The senators are getting tired -- "It's 1:30 and I can't believe anybody's here," Graham says -- but the activists here seem to be having the time of their lives. ("I have been in Washington since 1984 and I have never seen so much excitement in one room--ever," one of them declares to me.) Several digital cameras beep and whir. . . .

I keep thinking about the kids. The obvious question is, Don't you have school tomorrow? Then another speaker, an activist whose name I don't catch, clears that one up. He notes in passing that most of the youngsters present are home-schooled. Trying to be open-minded, I do my best to suppress Children of the Corn jokes. . . .

By now, the "debate" on the floor has slowed to tedious, repetitive speeches--mostly by freshman members of both parties who got stuck with the debate's worst time slots. Earlier in the evening, however, there had been a few delicious moments as Democrats mocked the phoniness of the marathon. At one point Nevada Democrat Harry Reid noted that when Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist conducted a poll about judicial filibusters on his website, the Democratic position won a 60 percent majority -- thanks to some well-coordinated mischief, no doubt -- before the posted results mysteriously vanished.

With evident delight, Reid also quoted from a GOP email that Democrats had somehow acquired that day.

It is important to double your efforts to get your boss to S-230 on time. Fox News channel is really excited about the marathon. Britt [sic] Hume at 6 would love to open the door to all our 51 Senators walking on to the floor. The producer wants to know, will we walk in exactly at 6:02 when the show starts so we can get it live to open Britt Hume's show? Or, if not, can we give them an exact time for the walk-in start?

Illinois Democrat Richard Durbin then asked Reid, with a funny faux-earnestness, whether "we [will] get updates from time to time how Fox News would like to orchestrate the rest of this?" "Perhaps so," Reid replied with a smile. "If not, maybe we could check with the Federalist Society, which, coincidentally, is starting their convention tomorrow." This was masterful stuff. Later in the night I would overhear one irked Republican staffer mutter to another "How did they get that email?" . . .

Down the hall, Democrats have set up their own headquarters. Theirs is dubbed the "Judges Action Room." But as 2 a.m. approaches, there's not a lot of action here -- just a few TV reporters and cameraman watching Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lincoln speak on a video monitor. As in the GOP war room, the "the debate" is barely audible. But the room does make the Democrats' point clear. Its centerpiece is a large blue placard with the word JOBS printed on it perhaps 100 times in yellow -- what Andy Warhol might have produced if he'd been a media consultant. I run into a Democratic aide and tell her about all the children down the hall. "It's kind of..." I begin, searching for a mature phrase. "Creepy?" she asks with a smile. Yes, creepy. Thank you. . . .

It's 2:30 and I'm ready for bed. I make one last swing through the GOP nerve center. There I see an adorable brown-haired girl, maybe 10 years old. Her eyes are swollen and red. She's crying. An older woman crouches down.

"What's the matter honey?"

"I just wanna go home," the poor girl whimpers.

"I know. So do I."

Republicans in Congress effectively shut down the federal government in 1995 in an ideological dispute with President Clinton over Medicare and budget deficits. Eight years later, they are shutting down the U.S. Senate in a dispute over jobs for three people.

Beginning Wednesday night, Republicans stopped all business in the Senate -- including consideration of several overdue appropriations bills -- to launch a 30-hour "Justice for Judges Marathon." Their plan is to focus attention on what they deem the Democrats' "unconscionable" obstruction of George W. Bush's judicial nominees. . . .

David Carle, press secretary for Sen. Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Democrats would be wearing buttons during the marathon that read "98 percent," signifying the number of Bush nominees that the Senate has already confirmed. In addition to Owen, Pickering and Pryor, Democrats have blocked a vote on the nomination of Miguel Estrada, a Bush nominee who eventually withdrew his nomination in frustration. Democrats are likely to block the nominations of Judge Carolyn Kuhl to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, but the Republicans have not yet taken the procedural steps necessary to trigger the Democrats' blockage.

Carle said that the 168-4 approval rate compares favorably with the Republicans' treatment of President Clinton's judicial nominees. According to statistics compiled by Leahy's office, 62 of Clinton's nominees were blocked while 248 of them were confirmed. . . .

The risk, of course, is that the Republicans marginalize themselves in the eyes of mainstream voters while appealing to the base. While the 1995 government shutdown centered around a high-octane philosophical debate between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, this Republican move may seem petty if Democrats can convince voters that it's all about just a handful of nominees. Going into the marathon, that certainly seemed to be the Democrats' plan: The Democrats' leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, told reporters he was going to focus not on a few judges looking for new jobs, but on the "3 million jobs that we've lost over the course of the last three years under this administration's economic policies."

As America scrambled desperately to find a workable formula to speed the handover of political power in Baghdad, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, warned yesterday that even with a new government in place US forces might remain in Iraq for two years or more.

Speaking as he arrived for talks in Japan - the latest country to refuse to send troops to join the US-led coalition in Iraq because of rising violence - Mr Rumsfeld reiterated that the political transition would be faster than originally intended. But he admitted that the speed of change would not mean US forces, who now number some 130,000, would leave any earlier.

The future political arrangements for Iraq will top the agenda during President George Bush's discussions with Tony Blair during his state visit next week. But Washington faces a dilemma - how to hand over political control as quickly as possible without being seen to cut and run. . . .

Washington is determined to present the faster political transition as a plan devised by the Iraqis rather than something imposed on them. For the White House, the important thing is to prevent events slipping out of control at the very moment Democrats are rounding on Mr Bush's handling of Iraq policy. Adding to Mr Bush's problems, a recent poll showed rising public scepticism about the rationale on which he took America to war, with 61 per cent of people saying that more time should have been allocated to the hunt for the alleged weapons of mass destruction.

A number of folks have raised a ruckus over a point I made Thursday night about the strained relations between the United States and South Korea (ROK).

Their beef is with this passage …

the deep strains in US-ROK relations … have deep roots. Much of it stems from difficulties adjusting to the end of the Cold War and Korean democracy itself, which is fairly new. But in no small measure the stance of the current South Korean government is the result of the Bush administration’s aggressive and unilateral policies toward the Korean Peninsula.

How can I call White House policy unilateral, these folks ask, when the US has been trying to get six-party negotiations underway for months?

How? Easy.

Through the second half of the 1990s the situation on the Korean peninsula was governed by what the South Koreans called the ‘sunshine policy,’ one of rapprochement with the North, and the so-called Agreed Framework. The latter was basically our deal to give the Koreans various stuff if they would shutter their plutonium-based drive for nuclear weapons.

Though imperfect and requiring revision, this approach was widely supported by our allies and sometime-allies in the region. Bill Clinton supported it. Colin Powell supported it, and wanted to continue it. But the White House didn’t support it. And it got deep-sixed for that reason.

The defining encounter came in March 2001 when then-President Kim Dae Jung visited the White House only to be told by the president that we were withdrawing support for his policy. As Jessica Matthews, head of the Carnegie Endowment put it, President Bush took “the architect of the North-South reconciliation and … publicly humiliate[d] him.”

For almost the next two years the White House pursued a bellicose and uncompromising policy vis-à-vis the North. Another defining moment came when the president labeled North Korea one of three members of the ‘axis of evil’ in January 2002.

Now, first for ‘aggressive.’

There’s a lively and complex debate about whether it was a good tactical move to apply this ‘axis of evil’ label to North Korea. But however you come down on that point, so long as you have your brainstem securely attached, I do not see how you can say this does not constitute an 'aggressive' approach.

Now, as to 'unilateral'.

As I was saying, the administration pursued this policy pretty much against the wishes of everyone in the region for almost two years --- all the while salting it with invidious contrasts between Clintonian appeasement and President Bush’s steely resolve.

Finally, in late 2002, the North Koreans called our bluff and it became clear we had little to back up our tough talk. Since then -- roughly since the spring of this year -- we've been trying to get everyone else in the region together to help us out of the jam. And for most of this year we've been slowly but surely making offers of various things that we said we'd never offer.

For much of that time, the response from other countries in the region has been that there's not that much to talk about until we put something on the table -- probably some offer of a security guarantee for the North Koreans. And the progress has been slow.

Now, just because our allies in the region didn't agree with our policy doesn't mean it wasn't the right policy. Similarly, just because we pursued the policy in defiance of their wishes doesn't mean it was a bad policy. But such an approach is pretty much the definition of a 'unilateral' policy.

What happened is that since the administration's unilateral policy hit a brick wall we've been trying to get the same regional allies on board to work our way out of the jam.

You don't need to know too much about foreign affairs to know that the term for such an approach isn't multilateralism but desperation, or perhaps multilateralism used in desperation after unilateralism has created grave damage.

Unilateralism has its place in limited situations. But let's not lie about it after the fact.

There is of course a telling and unfortunate parallel with the current situation in Iraq. Now that things are going south we're looking for help from anyone and everyone there too. But, again, that's desperation, not multilateralism. Does trying to get the South Koreans to send us a few troops change the fundamental character of our policy? Of course not. Everybody goes begging for help when they run out of options. That's human nature. The key is to avoid pursuing a policy based on recklessness and swagger that gets you into such a position in the first place.

In Iraq that is certainly where we are right now.

The president loaded us all into the family van, revved the thing up to 70 MPH, and slammed us into a brick wall called Reality.

As the administration sorts out a plan in talks with the Governing Council over the weekend, the first test may be in averting the appearance that the United States intends to cut and run. U.S. officials already sound defensive.

"We are not in a rush to leave. We will stay as long as we need to to ensure that Iraq is secure, that the hand-over makes sense and that a moderate Iraqi government emerges. And we're very capable of doing that," Army Gen. John Abizaid, the U.S. commander for Iraq and the Middle East, said at a news conference in Tampa yesterday.

Abizaid used the word "prudent" four times to describe his plans for Iraq.

President Bush said yesterday that the revamping of his policy was a "positive development" because it will get Iraqis "more involved" in the governance of their country.

But others were more skeptical. "If the policy is to more rapidly Iraqify the situation -- as in Vietnamization during the Vietnam War -- then that is another version of cutting and running. One way to cut and run is to simply say we're pulling out. Another is to prematurely turn over security to Iraqi forces and draw down American forces. That's a near-term prescription for disaster," said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee.

"All the political body language coming out of Washington these days seems to show that we are going to cut and run," said Thomas Mahnken, the acting director of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University. "That is precisely the wrong signal to be sending."

For an administration loath to concede it has made mistakes, redirecting U.S. policy is an open admission that the situation has reached a crisis point. Under mounting pressures, the White House had little choice but to effectively jettison the seven-point plan outlined by its own governor in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, just two months ago.

"We so underestimated and underplanned and underthought about a post-Saddam Iraq that we've been woefully unprepared," said Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), a Vietnam War veteran and member of the Foreign Relations Committee who has frequently visited Iraq. "Now we have a security problem. We have a reality problem. And we have a governance problem. . . . And time is not on our side."

Iraqification includes its own challenges. On the security front, experts worry that it will overburden the new and fragile Iraqi military and police units with limited training as they confront other Iraqis, particularly better-trained loyalists from Saddam Hussein's army. . . .

Accelerating the political transition is also risky -- and it could even jeopardize the goal of creating a democratic government. As part of the new strategy, the United States is prepared to endorse some form of elections before a new constitution is written -- reversing the order outlined in Bremer's seven-point plan -- to ensure that a new governing body would have the legitimacy that the current 24-member council, handpicked by the United States, lacks.

"Elections are always chancy. You don't know the outcome, and some of the wrong people may win out. But if we're advocating democracy, we'll have to take that risk," Hagel said.

There are no guarantees, for example, that either the constitutional committee or a reconstituted provisional government would back democratic ideas for a constitution. The most organized political forces in Iraq are the Islamist parties, particularly among the majority Shiite population, and the former Baathists among Sunni Muslims.

The two greatest U.S. fears are that Iraq will end up with a new autocrat or will become a theocracy rather than a democracy. Some U.S. officials fear that a transfer of authority before Iraq gets a new constitution could pose the danger that an interim leader becomes president for life.

Other dangers include handing over power to people who are not fully prepared to take political office or ending up after elections with a fractious constitutional committee or a provisional government unable to agree on the major political challenges ahead. If the United States draws down forces before political stability has been ensured, the differences among Iraqis could deteriorate into conflict.

With the White House finally acknowledging that the challenge in Iraq runs deeper than gloomy journalism, the talk of what to do next is sounding rather like Afghanistan. And that's alarming, because we have flubbed the peace in Afghanistan even more egregiously than in Iraq.

"There is a palpable risk that Afghanistan will again turn into a failed state, this time in the hands of drug cartels and narco-terrorists," Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, writes in a grim new report on Afghanistan. . . .

[T]he Pentagon made the same misjudgment about Afghanistan that it did about Iraq: it fatally underestimated the importance of ensuring security. The big winner was the Taliban, which is now mounting a resurgence.

"Things are definitely deteriorating on the security front," notes Paul Barker, the Afghan country director for CARE International. Twelve aid workers have been killed in the last year and dozens injured. A year ago, there was, on average, one attack on aid workers per month; now such attacks average one per day.

In at least three districts in the southeast, there is no central government representation, and the Taliban has de facto control. In Paktika and Zabul, not only have most schools closed, but the conservative madrasas are regaining strength.

"We've operated in Afghanistan for about 15 years," said Nancy Lindborg of Mercy Corps, the American aid group, "and we've never had the insecurity that we have now." She noted that the Taliban used to accept aid agencies (grudgingly), but that the Taliban had turned decisively against all foreigners.

"Separate yourself from Jews and the Christian community," a recent open letter from the Taliban warned. It ordered Afghans to avoid music, funerals for aid workers and "un-Islamic education" ? or face a "bad result."

The opium boom is one indication of the downward spiral. The Taliban banned opium production in 2000, so the 2001 crop was only 185 metric tons. The U.N. estimates that this year's crop was 3,600 tons, the second-largest in Afghan history. The crop is worth twice the Afghan government's annual budget, and much of the profit will support warlords and the Taliban.

An analyst in the U.S. intelligence community, who seeks to direct more attention to the way narco-trafficking is destabilizing the region, says that Afghanistan now accounts for 75 percent of the poppies grown for narcotics worldwide.

"The issue is not a high priority for the Bush administration," he said.

If Afghanistan is a White House model for Iraq, heaven help us.

It is an unusual charity brochure: a 13-page document, complete with pictures of fireworks and a golf course, that invites potential donors to give as much as $500,000 to spend time with Tom DeLay during the Republican convention in New York City next summer — and to have part of the money go to help abused and neglected children.

Representative DeLay, who has both done work for troubled children and drawn criticism for his aggressive political fund-raising in his career in Congress, said through his staff that the entire effort was fundamentally intended to help children. But aides to Mr. DeLay, the House majority leader from Texas, acknowledged that part of the money would go to pay for late-night convention parties, a luxury suite during President Bush's speech at Madison Square Garden and yacht cruises.

And so campaign finance watchdogs say Mr. DeLay's effort can be seen as, above all, a creative maneuver around the recently enacted law meant to limit the ability of federal officials to raise large donations known as soft money. . . .

Mr. DeLay's charity, Celebrations for Children Inc., was set up in September and has no track record of work. Mr. DeLay is not a formal official of the charity, but its managers are Mr. DeLay's daughter, Dani DeLay Ferro; Craig Richardson, a longtime adviser; and Rob Jennings, a Republican fund-raiser. Mr. Richardson said the managers would be paid by the new charity.

Mr. Richardson said the goal was to give 75 percent of the money it raised to children's charities, including some in the New York area. He said the charity also planned to hold other events at the Super Bowl.

But because the money collected will go into a nonprofit organization, donors get a tax break. And Mr. DeLay will never have to account publicly for who contributed, which campaign finance experts say shields those who may be trying to win favor with one of the most powerful lawmakers in Washington. . . .

But by holding events at the convention — and working under the auspices of a charity — Mr. DeLay has stepped into an ethical gray area, election law and tax law experts said.

"The event itself is being put on in a political atmosphere," said Larry Noble, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington and a former general counsel to the Federal Elections Commission. "It is clearly playing off DeLay's political leadership, and playing to people who find it in their political interest to be at the Republican convention."

"In that sense it is political," he added. "But does it make it a political activity on behalf of the charity?"

Mr. Richardson said the new charity has filed a request with the Internal Revenue Service for tax exempt status, which if granted would prohibit the organization from supporting a political candidate.

It would also mean part of the donations would be tax exempt — the amount contributed, minus the fair market value of what the donors get, or enjoy, in their time with Mr. DeLay.

The I.R.S. is barred by law from confirming or denying it has an application. But Marcus S. Owens, who served for 10 years as director of the exempt organization division of the I.R.S., said the link between the charity sponsored event and the Republican convention could raise a red flag at the tax agency.

"It's a factor that suggests the organization may not be nonpartisan, that there may be an element of endorsement involved in the organization's activities," Mr. Owens said.