The United States accepts that to avoid humiliating failure in Iraq it needs to bring its forces quickly under international control and speed the handover of power, Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, has said. Decisions along these lines will be made in the "coming days", Mr Solana told The Independent.

The comments, signalling a major policy shift by the US, precede President George Bush's state visit this week to London, during which he and Tony Blair will discuss an exit strategy for forces in Iraq.

Mr Solana underlined the change of mood in Washington, saying: "Everybody has moved, including the United States, because the United States has a real problem and when you have a real problem you need help." There is a "growing consensus" that the transfer of power has to be accelerated, he said. "How fast can it be done? I would say the faster the better."

He added: "The more the international community is incorporated under the international organisations [the better]. That is the lesson I think everyone is learning. Our American friends are learning that. We will see in the coming days decisions along these lines." . . .

As the EU's foreign policy representative, Mr Solana has been playing a significant, behind-the-scenes role. Until now, the US had resisted putting the allied forces under international auspices, although there is growing support in Washington for a Nato role.

Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, arrives in Brussels tonight for talks with EU ministers, which he will combine with a meeting with the retiring Nato secretary general, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. Diplomats say that Mr Powell is expected to "test the water" about the involvement of the transatlantic alliance in Iraq. The litany of setbacks, growing US casualties and the recent killing of 18 Italian servicemen has brought intense domestic and international pressure on the Bush administration to give the occupying force more legitimacy.

As recently as two weeks ago, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, called the guerrilla attacks on American forces in Iraq "strategically and operationally insignificant."

Insignificant? Actually, it is difficult to identify any military or political objectives that the guerrillas are not making real progress toward achieving. . . .

[L]ast week, after summoning to Washington the civilian administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, the Bush administration announced that it would transfer power to a provisional Iraqi government by next June.

Following on the heels of a string of guerrilla attacks and the disturbing results of the CIA study, it is a move that appears to be taken out of desperation. It took Afghan guerrillas almost 10 years to force the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The Iraqi guerrillas could plausibly achieve the same result against the United States before the end of 2004.

Sanchez's dismissive remark regarding the guerrillas reveals the contempt that conventional forces typically feel for them.

For example, when American commanders characterize the guerrillas as "cowardly," it only betrays the coalition's frustration in dealing with the raiders' hit-and-run tactics.

The belief that guerrilla warfare is unsophisticated or inferior is as wrong as it is widespread. As Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Samuel B. Griffith II noted, "This generalization is dangerously misleading and true only in the technological sense. If one considers the picture as a whole, a paradox is immediately apparent, and the primitive form is understood to be in fact more sophisticated than nuclear war or atomic war or war as it was waged by conventional armies, navies and air forces."

Gen. John Abizaid, the head of the U.S. Central Command, has stated that the number of insurgents "does not exceed 5,000." The United States has about 130,000 troops in Iraq. Yet during World War I, British officer T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) was able to tie down 200,000 Turkish troops with only 3,000 guerrillas. The Americans' numerical advantage is also exaggerated because the number of American combat-trained troops in Iraq is only 56,000; the remainder represent a support-and-logistics infrastructure. . . .

Experience strongly suggests that there is very little hope of destroying a revolutionary guerrilla movement after it has acquired the sympathetic support of a significant segment of the population, ranging from 15 percent to 25 percent. This support does not need to be actively sympathetic; it merely needs to not betray the insurgents. The intensely tribal nature of the Iraqi populace, where almost half of all marriages are between first cousins, buttresses this solidarity.

Sanchez's comment that the guerrilla attacks are "insignificant" is evocative of an exchange between an American officer and a North Vietnamese colonel just before the fall of Saigon in 1975.

"You know you never defeated us on the battlefield," the American said.

The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment.

"That may be so," he replied, "but it is also irrelevant."

International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.

In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."

President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq - also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.

But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.

French intransigence, he added, meant there had been "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein".

Mr Perle, who was speaking at an event organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, had argued loudly for the toppling of the Iraqi dictator since the end of the 1991 Gulf war.

George W. Bush will go down in history as America's worst environmental president. In a ferocious three-year attack, the Bush administration has initiated more than 200 major rollbacks of America's environmental laws, weakening the protection of our country's air, water, public lands and wildlife. Cloaked in meticulously crafted language designed to deceive the public, the administration intends to eliminate the nation's most important environmental laws by the end of the year. Under the guidance of Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the Bush White House has actively hidden its anti-environmental program behind deceptive rhetoric, telegenic spokespeople, secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and bureaucrats. The Bush attack was not entirely unexpected. George W. Bush had the grimmest environmental record of any governor during his tenure in Texas. Texas became number one in air and water pollution and in the release of toxic chemicals. In his six years in Austin, he championed a short-term pollution-based prosperity, which enriched his political contributors and corporate cronies by lowering the quality of life for everyone else. Now President Bush is set to do the same to America. After three years, his policies are already bearing fruit, diminishing standards of living for millions of Americans. . . .

The best way to judge the effectiveness of a democracy is to measure how it allocates the goods of the land: Does the government protect the commonwealth on behalf of all the community members, or does it allow wealth and political clout to steal the commons from the people?

Today, George W. Bush and his court are treating our country as a grab bag for the robber barons, doling out the commons to large polluters. Last year, as the calamitous rollbacks multiplied, the corporate-owned TV networks devoted less than four percent of their news minutes to environmental stories. If they knew the truth, most Americans would share my fury that this president is allowing his corporate cronies to steal America from our children.

[The] view that rebuilding Iraq would require a significant, sustained effort was echoed by the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Throughout 2002, sixteen groups of Iraqi exiles, coördinated by a bureau official named Thomas S. Warrick, researched potential problems in postwar Iraq, from the electricity grid to the justice system. The thousands of pages that emerged from this effort, which became known as the Future of Iraq Project, presented a sobering view of the country’s physical and human infrastructure—and suggested the need for a long-term, expensive commitment.

The Pentagon also spent time developing a postwar scenario, but, because of Rumsfeld’s battle with Powell over foreign policy, it didn’t coördinate its ideas with the State Department. The planning was directed, in an atmosphere of near-total secrecy, by Douglas J. Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, and William Luti, his deputy. According to a Defense Department official, Feith’s team pointedly excluded Pentagon officials with experience in postwar reconstructions. The fear, the official said, was that such people would offer pessimistic scenarios, which would challenge Rumsfeld’s aversion to using troops as peacekeepers; if leaked, these scenarios might dampen public enthusiasm for the war. “You got the impression in this exercise that we didn’t harness the best and brightest minds in a concerted effort,” Thomas E. White, the Secretary of the Army during this period, told me. “With the Department of Defense the first issue was ‘We’ve got to control this thing’—so everyone else was suspect.” White was fired in April. Feith’s team, he said, “had the mind-set that this would be a relatively straightforward, manageable task, because this would be a war of liberation and therefore the reconstruction would be short-lived.” . . .

In the Pentagon’s scenario, the responsibility of managing Iraq would quickly be handed off to exiles, led by Chalabi—allowing the U.S. to retain control without having to commit more troops and invest a lot of money. “There was a desire by some in the Vice-President’s office and the Pentagon to cut and run from Iraq and leave it up to Chalabi to run it,” a senior Administration official told me. “The idea was to put our guy in there and he was going to be so compliant that he’d recognize Israel and all the problems in the Middle East would be solved. He would be our man in Baghdad. Everything would be hunky-dory.” The planning was so wishful that it bordered on self-deception. “It isn’t pragmatism, it isn’t Realpolitik, it isn’t conservatism, it isn’t liberalism,” the official said. “It’s theology.” . . .

Two weeks ago, the Bush administration settled on an "exit strategy" for Iraq in which the United States committed itself to establishing self-rule there by next summer — well ahead of its previous schedule and just as the American presidential election season will be getting under way.

But the administration's initial plan for that transfer of authority has fallen apart, raising doubts about whether the June 30 deadline for ending the American occupation authority in Baghdad is still feasible.

At stake is whether the administration can reconcile President Bush's desire for a speedy transfer of sovereignty to a friendly Iraqi government next year, with the need to have some sort of electoral process to ensure that government's validity in the eyes of Iraqis and the rest of the world.

The "process," agreed upon two weeks ago, amounted to less than an election. Instead, it was an elaborate arrangement to hold caucuses throughout Iraq and give the Iraqi Governing Council considerable oversight.

The administration's quandary sharpened this week when Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's senior Shiite cleric, laid down his own definition of a legitimate government. Nothing less than an election was acceptable, he declared — a demand the United States and the Governing Council are now having to weigh.

Other Shiite leaders supported the Ayatollah's formulation, knowing that Shiites — who make up 60 percent of Iraq's population and are better organized than other groups — would be the likely beneficiaries of an early national election.

The fundamental question now is whether the administration has left itself enough time to put in place a government that can survive, be seen as legitimate, and is acceptable to the United States.

"We're boxed in," said an administration official. "We have a highly difficult set of issues to deal with here. We can't settle for just anything that gets us out of Iraq." . . .

"If we turn things over next July 1 to whatever slapdash conglomeration that is out there — let's say the Governing Council plus some others, which is what they want — you could have a civil war in Iraq come next November," an administration official said.

American policy makers also worry that, although elections are the most legitimate path to self-government, a vote held too quickly could be dangerous as well as impractical.

Some American policy makers fear that a nationwide ballot right now would bring out the most radical elements in the electorate, ready and able to exploit growing Iraqi resentments toward any candidates seen as favored by the United States.

Officials close to L. Paul Bremer III and his aides at the American-led occupation authority say his concerns about these problems led to the initial American decision to postpone the transfer of sovereignty to the end of 2004 at the earliest.

"It would be a disaster to have an election whose legitimacy was contested," said Noah Feldman, an assistant professor of law at New York University, who was a constitutional law adviser to Mr. Bremer earlier this year.

"Nobody wants Palm Beach County in Baghdad," Mr. Feldman added. "Historical experience also suggests that quick elections under postwar conditions elect people not dedicated to democratization. Simply put, if you move too fast, the wrong people could get elected."

Suddenly, earlier this month, that view shifted at the most senior levels of the administration in Washington. Mr. Bremer was summoned back for consultations, and a plan was worked out with the Iraqi Governing Council for what he called "a transparent, participatory democratic process" to choose a government.

"It was a document that looked like some treaty between the United States and the Indians in 1882," said Rami G. Khouri, executive editor of The Daily Star in Beirut. "To think they put this thing together in a couple of White House meetings with everyone in a panic mode, it's just humiliating."

The latest plan to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq is barely two weeks old, but it already faces an array of problems that has led Iraqis and Iraq experts to question its prospects for creating a stable democratic government by July 1.

U.S. officials, meanwhile, are developing fallback options. But the Bush administration's decision to hand over the reins in seven months has limited U.S. leverage to solve problems during this delicate period, Iraq experts say. Despite his power on paper, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer is effectively a lame duck, and everyone who disagrees with the U.S. plan knows it.

"Iraqis are now watching the calendar," said Henri Barkey, a former State Department policy planner who chairs Lehigh University's international relations department. "There's very little incentive to cooperate with the United States, because virtually every actor thinks he can get a better deal after the Americans leave."

"All of their activities are now designed to better their bargaining position for afterwards, not to help the United States now," Barkey said. "It's not necessarily because they're mean, but because the stakes are so high."

Even more daunting than the volatile security situation, administration officials concede, are assorted political skirmishes among Iraqis that jeopardize the next two big steps: writing a set of "basic laws," and selecting a provisional government to take over from the United States.

U.S. officials have been preoccupied in recent days with a demand from Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric for direct elections to the new government, rather than an indirect system of town hall gatherings and regional caucuses to pick delegates to a national assembly. But an even larger question now looms for the administration: Will the powerful Sunni community, which dominated Iraqi politics under Saddam Hussein, opt to boycott the process?

Large numbers appear likely to balk at the current political formula for one or more reasons: loyalty to Hussein, opposition to the plan, or fear of retribution for complying with the Americans, said Amatzia Baram, an Iraq expert and senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Sunni Arabs, who account for about a quarter of the 25 million Iraqis, are also the most fearful of democracy.

"The Sunnis view democracy with terror and as the destruction of their historic role and place in society, around which they've built their self-image," said Edward N. Luttwak, a Middle East analyst and author of "Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace." "For them it's a double loss. First they lose their dominance, and then they don't believe there will be any genuine protection of their rights as equals in a country with a majority Shiite Muslim population."

Sunnis may not actively protest or confront communities that do participate, but the refusal of large numbers to engage could undermine the U.S. plan or stall the political transition at the heart of Washington's exit strategy.

At the moment, however, Bremer's more pressing problem is navigating among rival parties willing or able to consider the U.S. plan. They fall into two broad categories: the handpicked Iraqi Governing Council, dominated by former exiles and five parties backed by the United States before the war, and the traditional leaders with far wider popular support among Shiite Muslims, Kurds and several minorities.

U.S. strategy has relied on the council to play the leading role in the transition. But in recent weeks it has become increasingly unclear whether the council "is part of the problem or part of the solution," Anthony H. Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, writes in an analysis from a recent trip to Iraq.

One way or another, key council members are vying either to shape the transition or ensure the council remains intact and a powerful body, as the U.S. plan envisions. Because many of the 24 council members probably would not fare well in open elections, they pressured Bremer to establish an indirect three-step system to select a new national assembly, which in turn would pick a prime minister and cabinet, a process so complex that many Iraqis and U.S. experts doubt it will work.

A former U.S. adviser to Bremer described the plan as "an insane selection system of caucuses, like the Iowa caucus selecting those who will vote in New Hampshire."