Mistakes Loom Large as Handover Nears
Missed Opportunities Turned High Ideals to Harsh Realities

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page A01

First of three articles

BAGHDAD -- The American occupation of Iraq will formally end this month having failed to fulfill many of its goals and stated promises intended to transform the country into a stable democracy, according to a detailed examination drawing upon interviews with senior U.S. and Iraqi officials and internal documents of the occupation authority.

The ambitious, 15-month undertaking stumbled because of a series of mistakes that began with an inadequate commitment of resources and was aggravated by a misunderstanding of Iraqi politics, religion and society in occupied Iraq, these participants said.

"We blatantly failed to get it right," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who served as an adviser to the occupation authority. "When you look at the record, it's impossible to escape the conclusion that we squandered an unprecedented opportunity."

Viewed from Baghdad since April 2003, the occupation has evolved from an optimistic partnership between Americans and Iraqis into a relationship riven by frustration and resentment. U.S. reconstruction specialists commonly complain of ungrateful Iraqis. Residents of a tough Baghdad neighborhood who welcomed U.S. forces with cold cans of orange soda last spring now jeer as military vehicles roll past. A few weeks ago, young men from the area danced atop a Humvee disabled by a roadside bomb, eventually torching it.

In many ways, the occupation appears to have transformed the occupier more than the occupied. Iraqis continue to endure blackouts, lengthy gas lines, rampant unemployment and the uncertain political future that began when U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad. But American officials who once roamed the country to share their sense of mission with Iraqis now face such mortal danger that they are largely confined to compounds surrounded by concrete walls topped with razor wire. Iraqis who come to meet them must show two forms of identification and be searched three times.

The Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. entity that has administered Iraq, cites many successes of its tenure. Nearly 2,500 schools have been repaired, 3 million children have been immunized, $5 million in loans has been distributed to small businesses and 8 million textbooks have been printed, according to the CPA. New banknotes have replaced currency with ousted president Saddam Hussein's picture. Local councils have been formed in every city and province. An interim national government promises to hold general elections next January.

But in many key quantifiable areas, the occupation has fallen far short of its goals.

The Iraqi army is one-third the size U.S. officials promised it would be by now. Seventy percent of police officers have not received training. When violence flared across the country this spring, many soldiers and policemen refused to perform their duties because U.S. forces had failed to equip them, designate competent leaders and win trust among the ranks.

About 15,000 Iraqis have been hired to work on projects funded by $18.6 billion in U.S. aid, despite promises to use the money to employ at least 250,000 Iraqis by this month. At of the beginning of June, 80 percent of the aid package, approved by Congress last fall, remained unspent.

Electricity generation remains stuck at around 4,000 megawatts, resulting in less than nine hours of power a day to most Baghdad homes, despite pledges from U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer to increase production to 6,000 megawatts by June 1.

Iraq's emerging political system is also at odds with original U.S. goals. American officials scuttled plans to remain as the occupying power until Iraqis wrote a permanent constitution and held democratic elections. Instead, Bremer will leave the Iraqis with a temporary constitution, something he repeatedly promised not to do, and an interim government with a president who was not the Bush administration's preferred choice.

The CPA, which had 3,000 employees at its peak, will dissolve on June 30, the date designated to confer sovereignty on Iraq's interim government. U.S.-led military forces -- 138,000 U.S. troops and 23,000 from other nations -- will remain, free to conduct operations without the approval of the interim government. The management of reconstruction projects and other civilian tasks will be handled by a new U.S. embassy.

Over the course of the occupation, the relationship between the CPA and the military has become increasingly bitter. Soldiers have blamed civilians for not rebuilding the country quickly enough to pacify the country, while civilians have blamed the military for not providing enough security to enable the rebuilding. In the view of several senior officials here, a shortage of U.S. troops allowed the security situation to spiral out of control last year. Attacks on U.S.-led forces and foreign civilians now average more than 40 a day, a threefold increase since January. Assassinations of Iraqi political leaders and debilitating sabotage of the country's oil and electricity infrastructure now occur routinely.

On the eve of its dissolution, the CPA has become a symbol of American failure in the eyes of most Iraqis. In a recent poll sponsored by the U.S. government, 85 percent of respondents said they lacked confidence in the CPA. The criticism is echoed by some Americans working in the occupation. They fault CPA staffers who were fervent backers of the invasion and of the Bush administration, but who lacked reconstruction skills and Middle East experience. Only a handful spoke Arabic.

Within the marble-walled palace of the CPA's headquarters inside Baghdad's protected Green Zone, there is an aching sense of a mission unaccomplished. "Did we really do what we needed to do? What we promised to do?" a senior CPA official said. "Nobody here believes that."

This account is drawn from interviews with a score of current and former CPA officials, several in senior positions, other U.S. government officials and Iraqis who work with the CPA. Most spoke on the condition they not be identified by name because of rules barring people working for the CPA from speaking to journalists without approval from CPA public affairs officials.

In an interview last week, Bremer maintained that "Iraq has been fundamentally changed for the better" by the occupation. The CPA, he said, has put Iraq on a path toward a democratic government and an open economy after more than three decades of a brutal socialist dictatorship. Among his biggest accomplishments, he said, were the lowering of Iraq's tax rate, the liberalization of foreign-investment laws and the reduction of import duties.

Bremer acknowledged he was not able to make all the changes to Iraq's political system and economy that he had envisioned, including the privatization of state-run industries. He lamented missing his goal for electricity production and the effects of the violence. In perhaps the most candid self-criticism of his tenure, he said the CPA erred in the training of Iraqi security forces by "placing too much emphasis on numbers" instead of the quality of recruits.

"When I step back, there's a lot left to be done," he said.

A 'Naive' Blueprint

Bremer said that when he arrived in Baghdad on May 12, 2003, he was shocked by what he saw.

Policemen were not at work. The capital's two antiquated power plants were barely running. Looted government buildings were smoldering. Prominent exiles who had returned with the intention of running the government were unwilling to share power with Iraqis who had lived under Hussein.

With no significant security threat to attenuate their ambition, Bremer and his staff set out trying to reconstruct Iraq from the bottom up, focusing on long-term solutions instead of short-term fixes. They announced that Iraqis would have to achieve a series of political milestones before the United States would return sovereignty.

Instead of reconstituting the Iraqi army, they decided to build a new defense force from scratch. Bremer directed his advisers to restructure government ministries. He advocated expansive free-market economic reforms. As a sign of the break with the past, Bremer issued an order banning many members of Hussein's Baath Party from participating in government.

Several current and former CPA officials contended that key decisions by Bremer favored a grandiose vision over Iraqi realities and reflected the perceived prerogatives of a military victor. Critics within the CPA also faulted Bremer for working to advance a conservative economic agenda of tax cuts and free trade instead of focusing on the delivery of basic services.

"There was this grand idea that we were going to turn Iraq into a model nation, a model democracy, with an ideal constitution and an ideal economy and an ideal military," said a State Department official who spent several months working for the CPA. "It was just naive."

Despite the scale of their plans, and Bremer's conclusion by last July that Iraq would need "several tens of billions of dollars" for reconstruction, CPA specialists had virtually no resources to fund projects on their own to create much-needed local employment in the months after the war. Instead, they relied on two U.S. firms, Halliburton Co. and Bechtel Corp., which were awarded large contracts to patch Iraq's infrastructure.

The CPA also lacked experienced staff. A few development specialists were recruited from the State Department and nongovernmental organizations. But most CPA hiring was done by the White House and Pentagon personnel offices, with posts going to people with connections to the Bush administration or the Republican Party. The job of reorganizing Baghdad's stock exchange, which has not reopened, was given in September to a 24-year-old who had sought a job at the White House. "It was loyalty over experience," a senior CPA official said.

By late summer, as car bombs rocked Baghdad and ambushes were on the rise, Bremer and his advisers decided to scale back their ambitions. Privatization plans were dropped. Instead of thorough screening and training for Iraqi police officers, military commanders were ordered to hire and arm as many officers as they could find. Faced with objections from Iraqi religious leaders and impatient local politicians, the White House and the CPA reversed course and promised to hand over power before a permanent constitution was written.

But Bremer remained committed to reconstruction. He went to Congress in September and pleaded for a massive aid package, arguing that rebuilding the country, an endeavor that could employ hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, would help to achieve long-term stability.

"The plan was to have Iraqis step up to protect and govern their country and leave it to the Americans to help them with reconstruction," the senior CPA official said. "It was great in theory. But in reality, it was untenable."

Economic Miscalculations

The Daura Power Plant in southern Baghdad was supposed to be a model of the U.S. effort to rebuild Iraq. Bombed in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and neglected by Hussein's government, the station could operate at no more than a quarter of its rated capacity, leading to prolonged blackouts in the capital.

After CPA specialists toured the decrepit facility last summer, they vowed to bring it back to life. German and Russian firms were hired to make repairs, and it was placed atop a list of priority projects intended to achieve a 6,000-megawatt goal for national electricity production. More power, Bremer hoped, would improve the economy and daily life enough to reduce violence and stabilize Iraq.

Today, the Daura plant is indeed a model -- of how the U.S. reconstruction effort has failed to meet its goals.

The German contractors fled for their safety in April. The Russians departed in late May, after two of their colleagues were shot to death by insurgents as they approached the plant in a minivan.

Inside the facility, parts are strewn on the floor, awaiting installation. Iraqi technicians in blue coveralls lounge around, smoking cigarettes and waiting for guidance. In the turbine room, graffiti on the wall reads: "Long Live the Resistance."

The CPA intended for the Daura plant to be producing more than 500 megawatts of power by June 1. But the best it can do at the moment is 100 megawatts -- half of its output of last summer.

"We were supposed to have improved," said Bashir Khallaf, the plant director. "But we have gotten worse."

The failure to fix Daura and other plants, coupled with sabotage attacks on power lines, have renewed the debilitating blackouts that plagued Iraq last summer. The situation is not much better for other services. Attempts to fix water-treatment plants and oil refineries also are far behind schedule, forcing the country -- which has the world's second-largest oil reserves and two large rivers -- to import gasoline and bottled water. Recent attacks on fuel convoys and pipelines have depleted stockpiles, resulting in lengthy gas lines.

Several CPA officials said the Bush administration has long underestimated reconstruction costs. In its war planning, the administration devoted $900 million to reconstruction despite reporting by the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations that depicted a far greater need. In the first months of the occupation, an additional $1.1 billion was committed by the White House. It was not until September that the administration asked Congress for billions more.

Although the $18.6 billion reconstruction aid package was approved by Congress in November, the Pentagon office charged with spending it has moved slowly. About $3.7 billion of this package had been spent by June 1, according to the CPA. Many projects that have received funding have slowed or stopped entirely because Western firms have withdrawn employees from Iraq in response to attacks on civilian contractors.

CPA officials contend the money should have been earmarked and spent far sooner. Had that happened, they argue, the CPA could have retained much of the goodwill that existed among Iraqis after the U.S. invasion and possibly weakened the insurgency.

"The failure to get the reconstruction effort launched early will be regarded as the most important critical failure," said one of Bremer's senior advisers. "If we could have fixed things faster, the situation would be very different today."

By starting late, the adviser said, the CPA got "caught in a security trap." More than $2 billion of the aid package will be spent hiring private guards for contractors, buying them armored vehicles and building secure housing compounds, CPA officials estimate. "If we had spent this money sooner, before things got bad, we could have spent more of it on actually helping the Iraqi people," the adviser said.

Because many of the 2,300 projects to be funded by the $18.6 billion are large construction endeavors that will involve foreign laborers instead of Iraqis, they will result in far less of a local economic boost than the CPA had promised, another senior official involved in the reconstruction said. The projects were chosen largely without input from Iraqis.

"This was supposed to be our big effort to help them -- 18 billion of our tax dollars to fix their country," the senior reconstruction official said. "But the sad reality is that this program won't have a lot of impact in it for the Iraqis. The primary beneficiaries will be American companies."

Security Miscalculations

When anti-occupation militiamen converged on the Rafidain police station on April 4, officers inside the blue-walled building sprang into action.

They grabbed their possessions and ran home.

The militiamen were members of the Mahdi Army, an untrained but well-armed force inspired by Moqtada Sadr, a firebrand Shiite Muslim cleric deemed an outlaw by the U.S. military. Incensed that U.S. troops had shut down his newspaper and arrested one of his top deputies the day before, Sadr's followers seized government buildings in Shiite holy cities south of Baghdad and in Sadr City, a Shiite slum in the capital.

The militiamen met surprisingly little resistance. Rafidain, in central Sadr City, was no exception.

"To shoot those people would have been wrong," said Sgt. Falah Hassan, a lanky veteran whose uniform consists of rolled-up jeans and a rumpled blue shirt. "If a man comes with principles and I believe in those principles, I will not shoot him."

The collapse of police and civil defense units in the face of the Sadr offensive stunned CPA officials, who had expected them to put up a fight. A few days later, the CPA was surprised again when a battalion of Iraq's new army mutinied rather than obey orders to help U.S. Marines fight Sunni Muslim insurgents in the streets of Fallujah.

Bremer and senior CPA officials concluded that the creation of new Iraqi security forces was in trouble. The decision to hire back as many former policemen as possible, even without training, had been meant to reassure Iraqis by putting more officers on the street. But it also put thousands of ill-prepared men, some with ties to the insurgency, into uniform -- a problem that the CPA long feared but did not fully grasp until the Sadr rebellion.

"Quantity overrode quality," said Douglas Brand, a British police commander who has served as a senior CPA adviser to the Iraqi police force. "We scooped up a whole lot of people who didn't meet our criteria and put them into the police force."

Of nearly 90,000 police on duty now, more than 62,000 still have not received any training.

But Iraqi political leaders and several CPA officials contend that the problems with security were more fundamental than training police. The U.S. military came to Iraq with too few soldiers to maintain order and guard the country's borders against foreign terrorists, they said. "I don't know anyone who thinks there's enough troops here," the senior adviser to Bremer said.

These officials said the troop shortage was compounded by the decision to disband the Iraqi army. Not only did it deprive the U.S. military of tens of thousands of armed and uniformed men to help restore order, but scores of unemployed soldiers joined the ranks of insurgents fighting the occupation forces.

"We should have brought them back and vetted them over time instead of saying, 'We don't want you,' " a senior U.S. military officer in Baghdad said.

Bremer said that the army fell apart after Hussein's defeat and that it was not practical to order units back into service. And as with the police, there were questions about the loyalty and competence of the soldiers.

Another major mistake, Iraqi and U.S. officials said, was the failure to provide enough equipment to the police and the Civil Defense Corps, a 40,000-member paramilitary force. At the Rafidain station, only half the 140 officers have handguns. There are only 10 AK-47 assault rifles in the armory, three pickup trucks in the parking lot and two radios in the control room. Body armor is nonexistent, save for a few U.S. military vests worn by guards at the front door.

"How can we defend ourselves if we don't have guns and radios and cars?" said Maj. Raed Kadhim, the senior officer at the station. "The Americans promised us all of these things. Where are they?"

The sympathy for Sadr today at the Rafidain station -- on Fridays, officers pin his picture to their uniforms before going to the mosque -- suggests that the odds of getting the police to resist the cleric's militia have not improved. The scope of the confrontation could have been smaller, according to several CPA officials, had U.S. forces moved against Sadr in August, when an Iraqi court issued an arrest warrant for him. Instead, they allowed him months to build support for his anti-occupation views.

By April, with the CPA's internal polling showing 80 percent of Iraqis holding positive views of Sadr, the CPA should have sought a political solution, the officials contend. At the very least, they argue, CPA strategists and military commanders should have realized that many Iraqi security officers would side with the cleric.

"The Americans misunderstood us," Kadhim said. "We will fight for Iraq. We will not fight for them."

Political Miscalculations

From the start of the occupation, the American effort to transform Iraq's political system was challenged by another Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a cleric far more established than Sadr. The CPA's inability to deal with him forced a series of compromises that will affect Iraq long after Bremer departs.

Sistani is a man in his seventies with a snowy beard who has lived in isolation for the past six years in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. With millions of followers, he is seen as the most influential leader of Iraq's Shiite majority, a man whom Shiite politicians do not want to cross.

Sistani's position was straightforward: Iraqis, not Americans, should determine the country's political future. In June 2003, he issued a religious edict calling for Iraq's constitution to be written by elected representatives -- a demand that was in direct conflict with the Bush administration's political transition plan.

Bremer and his staff initially underestimated the influence of his edict, assuming that Shiite political leaders would be able to persuade Sistani to change his position. It was not until November that Bremer concluded there was no way to sway Sistani -- whom Bremer has never met -- and that the Bush administration's plan to have a group of appointed Iraqis write a constitution would have to be scrapped.

After hurried meetings at the White House, Bremer unveiled a new transition plan on Nov. 15 that abandoned the goal of a permanent constitution and general elections before a handover of sovereignty. Instead, the Iraqi Governing Council, the 25-member body picked by Bremer, was assigned to produce a temporary constitution. An interim government would be selected through caucuses.

Nobody bothered to run the details by Sistani first. He objected a few days later, forcing another series of changes and leading President Bush to ask U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to select the interim government. In the end, Bremer did not get the president he wanted: His favored candidate, Adnan Pachachi, withdrew after Shiite politicians threatened not to work with him, prompting Brahimi to choose Ghazi Yawar, a tribal sheik with no experience in government before serving on the Governing Council.

Sistani also objected to the temporary constitution. Ethnic Kurds, who had been living in an autonomous region since 1991, had insisted on a clause that would protect their rights with veto power over the language in a permanent constitution. But because Shiites are about 60 percent of Iraq's population and Kurds make up only 20 percent, Sistani was concerned that a minority not be allowed to overrule the wishes of the majority.

Bremer did not want to budge. If the provision were expunged, the Kurds would bolt. He persuaded Shiite members of the Governing Council to sign the interim constitution, leaving Sistani's basic objections unaddressed.

Then, earlier this month, the Bush administration proposed having the U.N. Security Council include an endorsement of the interim constitution in a resolution on Iraq's future. Sistani quickly issued a statement: The interim constitution, he said, "was written by a nonelected council under occupation" and is "rejected by the majority of the Iraqi people."

But when the administration expunged the reference to the interim constitution, Kurdish leaders were incensed. Iraq's top two Kurdish officials sent a letter to Bush threatening to pull out of the interim government formed earlier this month.

The dispute means Shiites and Kurds will have to hash out their differences on their own. Among the options Shiite leaders favor is dispensing with the interim constitution and writing a new version, a potentially embarrassing outcome for the administration, which has held up the document as one of the CPA's most significant achievements.

Iraqi leaders and foreign diplomats fault the CPA for not grasping Sistani's clout soon enough. Senior CPA officials said Bremer did recognize Sistani's power, but the problem was communicating with the cleric: Because Sistani refused to meet anyone from the CPA, messages were conveyed by Shiite politicians who skewed statements to suit their interests.

Although some in the CPA say they believe it is better to let Iraqis resolve the dispute over the interim constitution after June 30, others argue that the occupation authority should have ensured it had a document supported by Sistani.

"We were supposed to leave them with a permanent constitution," a senior CPA official said. "Then we decided to leave them with a temporary constitution. Now we're leaving them with a temporary constitution that the majority dislikes."

Out of Touch

Life inside the high-security Green Zone -- what some CPA staffers jokingly call the Emerald City -- bears little resemblance to that in the rest of Baghdad. The power is always on. Shiny shuttle buses zip passengers around. Outdoor cafes stay open late into the night.

There is little effort to comply with Islamic traditions. Beer flows freely at restaurants. Women walk around in shorts. Bacon cheeseburgers are on the CPA's lunch menu.

"It's like a different planet," said an Iraqi American who has a senior position in the CPA and lives in the Green Zone but regularly ventures out to see relatives. "It's cut off from the real Iraq."

Because the earth-toned GMC Suburbans used by CPA personnel and foreign contractors have become a favored target of insurgents, traveling outside the Green Zone -- into the Red Zone that defines the rest of Iraq -- requires armored vehicles and armed escorts, which are limited to senior officials. Lower-ranking employees must either remain within the compound or sneak out without a security detail.

Although the CPA has tried to bring Iraqis into the CPA headquarters for meetings and other events -- there has even been an "Iraqi Culture Night" in the Green Zone -- the inability to mingle with Iraqis has isolated the Americans. "We don't know the outside," the senior adviser to Bremer said. "How many of us have gone out to buy a bottle of milk or a pair of socks?"

Instead of building contacts at social events in the city, CIA operatives in Baghdad drink in their own rattan-furnished bar in the Green Zone. Instead of prowling local markets, CPA employees go to the Green Zone Shopping Bazaar, where the most popular items are Saddam Hussein memorabilia.

Limited contact with Iraqis outside the Green Zone has made CPA officials reliant on the views of those chosen by Bremer to serve on the Governing Council. When Brahimi, the U.N. envoy, asked the CPA for details about several Iraqis he was considering for positions in the interim government, he told associates he was "shocked to find how little information they really had," according to an official who was present.

The CPA official who got around the most was Bremer, who travels with an entourage of private guards, most of them former Navy SEALs, equipped with helicopters and a fleet of armored vehicles.

Bremer's willingness to travel and to work 18-hour days has won him respect within the CPA. The chief criticism of his tenure within the former Hussein palace that serves as CPA headquarters was that he failed to recruit enough seasoned diplomats with experience in the Middle East.

In the final days of the CPA, many officials have succumbed to bitterness. Some blame military commanders for not asking for more troops to stabilize the country. "They had enough soldiers to ensure that Saddam's men didn't come back to power, but there were nowhere near enough to make the country safe enough for us to do our work," a CPA reconstruction specialist said.

Military officials say CPA personnel spend too much time in the 258-room headquarters. "Nobody has any idea what they do back in that palace," a senior Marine commander in Fallujah said recently. "We certainly don't see any results."

Several veterans of other reconstruction operations characterized civilian-military relations in Iraq as the worst they have encountered. "It has been poisonous," the reconstruction specialist said.

The other major conflict within the occupation bureaucracy has set the legions of young staff members chosen for their loyalty to the Bush administration against older, more liberal diplomats from the State Department and the British Foreign Office. Several of the diplomats said they regarded the young staffers as inexperienced and eager to pad their résumés during three-month tours.

These diplomats singled out the Office of Strategic Communications as unsuccessful in its efforts to disseminate information to Iraqis. Instead of creating an all-news television station that would compete with other Arab broadcasters that the CPA deemed anti-occupation, the communications office, with several employees straight from Republican staff jobs on Capitol Hill, set up a channel that aired children's programs and Egyptian cooking shows.

"It didn't put any effort into communicating with the Iraqi people," a British CPA official said. "Stratcom viewed its job as helping Bush to win his next election."

Even within the communications office, there is a sense that the occupation has not gone as well as everyone hoped. "It's a time of introspection," one press officer said.

Elsewhere in the palace, the sense of regret is far more pronounced. The senior adviser to Bremer said he felt "a sense of opportunity that slipped away."

"The ambition for us was a grand one. We had great things in mind for them. We believed we could do it," he said. "But we didn't keep our promises."

NEXT: Learning the hard way

An Educator Learns the Hard Way
Task of Rebuilding Universities Brings Frustration, Doubts and Danger

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 21, 2004; Page A01

Second of three articles

BAGHDAD -- John Agresto arrived here nine months ago with two suitcases, a feather pillow and a suffusion of optimism. He didn't know much about Iraq, but he felt certain the American occupation, and his mission to oversee the country's university system, would be a success.

"Like everyone else in America, I saw the images of people cheering as Saddam Hussein's statue was pulled down. I saw people hitting pictures of him with their shoes," said Agresto, the former president of St. John's College in New Mexico. "Once you see that, you can't help but say, 'Okay. This is going to work.' "

But the Iraq he encountered was different from what he had expected. Visits to the universities he was trying to rebuild and the faculty he wanted to invigorate were more and more dangerous, and infrequent. His Iraqi staff was threatened by insurgents. His evenings were disrupted by mortar attacks on the occupation authority's Baghdad headquarters.

His plans to repair hundreds of campus buildings were scuttled by the Bush administration's decision to shift reconstruction efforts and by the failure to raise money from other sources. His hope that Iraqis would put aside differences and personal interests for a common cause was, as he put it, "way too idealistic."

"I'm a neoconservative who's been mugged by reality," Agresto said as he puffed on a pipe next to a resort-size swimming pool behind the marbled palace that houses the occupation authority.

"We can't deny there were mistakes, things that didn't work out the way we wanted," he added. "We have to be honest with ourselves."

Agresto's candor is unusual among the staff of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. bureaucracy responsible for the civil administration of Iraq until June 30. He is one of the few American officials here to speak on the record at length about the shortcomings of the occupation. In his case, the frustration comes from the sense of a missed golden opportunity: to reconstruct Iraq's decrepit universities and create an educational system that would nurture and promote the country's best minds.

Iraq's institutions of higher learning were once the most modern in the Middle East. But they were asphyxiated under Saddam Hussein, then further devastated by the looting that engulfed the country after Hussein's government was toppled last year. In his initial travels around Iraq, Agresto observed students sitting on the floor in burned-out classrooms. He visited technical colleges with no tools. He saw academic journals from the 1960s kept under lock at an agricultural college because the school did not possess any more recent books.

"It's difficult to describe how bad things were," he recalled.

Agresto concluded that the universities needed $1.2 billion to become viable centers of learning and reap immediate goodwill for the American rebuilding effort. But of the $18.6 billion U.S. reconstruction package approved by Congress last year, the higher education system received $8 million, a tiny fraction of his proposal. When Agresto asked the U.S. Agency for International Development for 130,000 desks, he got 8,000.

Embittered, he sent the desks to the southern city of Basra, which was hard hit by the looting. He earmarked the $8 million for the construction of new science labs, leaving scores of other needs unmet.

"I really thought this would have been valuable money -- well spent and sorely needed," he said. "We're not buying books for the libraries. We're not buying saws and nails for the technical institutes. We're not replacing the computers that were stolen. I can't be anything but sad about it."

Agresto, a lifelong Republican and political conservative, does not regard himself as a turncoat. He still believes in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Despite his disappointment with the lack of reconstruction, he is proud of the changes the Coalition Provisional Authority instilled in Iraq's universities, including the promotion of academic freedom and a purge of senior officials of Hussein's Baath Party. He says he feels the CPA accomplished "a lot of good under very difficult conditions."

While acknowledging American mistakes, Agresto aimed some of his most pointed criticism at Iraqis. In his view, the Americans toppled a dictator and prepared the ground for democracy, but Iraqis have not stepped up to build on that start.

"They don't know how to be a community," he said. "They put their individual interests first. They only look out for themselves."

Invited by the Pentagon

Agresto, 58, has thinning silver hair, a gray-flecked mustache and a prominent nose. He has a stocky build and a fondness for self-deprecating comments about his appearance that usually begin with comparisons to Groucho Marx.

Garrulous and energetic, he came to work for the CPA in the same way most other senior-level officials did: He was invited by the Pentagon because of his experience and his political connections.

The son of a Brooklyn dockworker, he was the first in his family to go to college. He went on to earn a doctorate in political science from Cornell University. After a brief teaching career, he joined the National Endowment for the Humanities during the culture wars of the 1980s, and was deputy to two prominent chairmen, William J. Bennett and Lynne V. Cheney. In the 15 months between their tenures, he was the organization's acting chairman.

After leaving the endowment, he spent 11 years as president of St. John's, a small, classical liberal arts college in Santa Fe known for its Great Books curriculum. He retired in 2000 and set up a consulting company. He spent his spare time preparing homemade Italian sausage and relaxing with his wife in their cabin near the Pecos River in New Mexico.

After U.S. troops rolled into Baghdad, he got a call from his predecessor at St. John's, who asked whether he'd be interested in serving as the CPA's senior adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education. Intrigued, he placed a call to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, whose wife had served on the board at St. John's.

"I said, 'Do you think I'd be appropriate?' And he said, 'Yes. Absolutely,' " Agresto recalled. Agresto said he thought, "I'm almost 60 years old. I don't have that many years left to do good." And he accepted.

"This is what Americans do: They go and help," he said. "I guess I just always wanted to be a good American."

He knew next to nothing about Iraq's educational system. Even after he was selected, he did not pore through a reading list. "I wanted to come here with as open a mind as I could have," he said. "I'd much rather learn firsthand than have it filtered to me by an author." He did a Google search on the Internet. The result? "Not much," he said.

His training from the Defense Department was no more extensive. "They taught me how to put on a gas mask, how to get the helmet snug, how to button up your flak jacket," he said. "That's it."

None of that fazed him. He assumed, he said, that Iraq would feel like a newly liberated East European nation, keen to embrace the West and democratic change.

Not until he arrived in Baghdad on Sept. 15, and was assigned to live in a metal trailer with three other CPA staffers, did he realize how complicated his job would be.

Fundraising Failures

Looters began ransacking Mustansiriya University on April 9, 2003, the day Hussein's government collapsed. By April 12, the campus of yellow-brick buildings and grassy courtyards was stripped of its books, computers, lab equipment and desks. Even electrical wiring was pulled from the walls. What was not stolen was set ablaze, sending dark smoke billowing over the capital that day.

When Agresto saw the damage to Mustansiriya and the nearby College of Technology -- where 3,000 computers and every bit of laboratory equipment were stolen in a four-hour period -- he was shocked. "What the looting did to the capacity to teach was incredible," he said. "The Americans don't want to talk about it because we did so little to stop the looting."

Soon, Mustansiriya was limping back to life. The school, which takes its name from a 13th-century Baghdad institution considered to be the first university in the Arab world, was being rebuilt by Iraqis, who were paid with donations from local mosques and charities. But the professors lacked the funds to replace computers, books and laboratory gear.

Agresto was determined to help. President Bush was preparing to ask Congress for billions of dollars in reconstruction assistance. Universities, Agresto figured, had to be among the most worthy candidates for American funding. He calculated that he could also attract money from an upcoming conference of international donors in Madrid.

After receiving reports from each of the country's 22 universities, whose collective enrollment is more than 375,000, CPA number crunchers estimated that Iraq would need $1.2 billion to "take its rightful place in the world's intellectual, cultural, economic, and political communities."

Agresto and his staff of 10 sent funding requests to the CPA officials who were compiling the administration's aid package. But word came back that the administration would focus its request on rebuilding Iraq's security services and electrical infrastructure. The White House planned to ask Congress for only $35 million for higher education. The rest would have to come from foreign donors.

Agresto put together what he hoped was a persuasive plea for international aid. It included plans for "a nationwide electronic library network" and a "Western-style graduate business school." "We now have the opportunity to make a new start, and to supply Iraq with, for example, some of the best classrooms, laboratories and libraries possible," the CPA wrote in its pitch to donors.

At the conference in October, donor nations pledged in excess of $400 million for Iraqi universities. But none of that money has arrived in Baghdad.

"There was a lot of talk," he said, "but little follow-through."

The same thing occurred on Capitol Hill. The $35 million request was whittled down to $8 million.

At Mustansiriya, where the labs are devoid of equipment and the student union is in a charred building, acting President Taki Moussawi said he has stopped waiting for help from the Americans. "We've had so many promises, so many hopes," he said as he walked through a gutted structure that used to be the president's office. "We don't believe the Americans anymore. We're just disappointed."

Some American academics who are familiar with Iraq's university system blame the Bush administration, and Agresto, for failing to secure more independent funding. They said that in choosing Agresto, the White House shunned scholars with greater acceptance in academic circles, many of whom had opposed the invasion, in favor of a conservative loyalist who had spent much of his career criticizing the U.S. academic establishment.

"Had it been someone different than Agresto, the possibility of that would have been so much better," said Keith Watenpaugh, an assistant professor of Middle East history at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., who traveled to Baghdad last year to assess Iraq's university system. "The politics of the occupation were so divisive, and the American academy felt so disempowered by the way things were happening, that when such political creatures like Agresto came asking for things, it was too difficult to put aside those politics. If the administration had really been committed to rebuilding Iraq's education structures, they wouldn't have sent Agresto."

Rethinking Assumptions

At 8 a.m. on the morning of Jan. 18, a white pickup truck loaded with 1,000 pounds of plastic explosives and several 155mm artillery shells exploded at the main public gate to the CPA's headquarters. More than 20 people were killed and at least 60 were wounded. Almost all of them were Iraqis and many of them worked for the CPA.

Agresto, who was inside the palace and heard the blast, assumed that the attack would provoke widespread revulsion at the taking of innocent life, and would rally popular sentiment against the insurgency and in favor of the goals of the occupation.

"What I expected was the Mothers March for Peace or the Don't Kill Our Kids movement or somebody to come out and say: 'Stop this. We want democracy,' " he said. But that never occurred. Iraqis held funerals and went on with life. U.S. troops erected even larger concrete blast walls in front of the gate.

When he asked Iraqis working for the CPA why there was not more outrage, he sensed apprehension. Everyone he talked to was too scared to condemn the insurgents in public.

"I saw people still afraid," he said. "I saw how easy it was to speak against the Americans and how dangerous it was to speak for democracy and liberty."

The aftermath of the bombing led Agresto to rethink some of his most fundamental assumptions about the American effort to transform Iraq. Suddenly, a goal that had appeared attainable seemed so far from reach. Perhaps, he concluded, U.S. planners should have settled for something less than full democracy.

He reasoned that the occupation's chief goal should have been to restore security, and only later to begin other work in earnest.

"We're trying to establish a democratic government without a democratic people," he said. "I don't know how possible that is."

Agresto's views are a break from those of his allies in the Bush administration, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who argue that Iraqis are ready for democracy.

"We should have been less ambitious," Agresto said. "Our goal should have been to build a free, safe and a prosperous Iraq -- with the emphasis on safe. Democratic institutions could be developed over time. Instead, we keep talking about democratic elections. If you asked an ordinary Iraqi what they want, the first thing they would say wouldn't be democracy or elections, it would be safety. They want to be able to walk outside their homes at night."

Academic Freedom

As his white Toyota Land Cruiser pulled out of the Green Zone one day earlier this month and entered what CPA staffers call the Red Zone, Agresto took a deep breath. He was in the middle of Baghdad's hurly-burly morning rush-hour traffic. And he was exposed.

Instead of traveling in an earth-tone GMC Suburban with armed guards as many of his colleagues do, Agresto had chosen a lower profile. His Land Cruiser had blue Ministry of Higher Education license plates. He was not wearing a flak jacket or helmet. He hoped his Mediterranean complexion would allow him to pass for a fair-skinned northern Iraqi.

As his vehicle crossed the Tigris River and sped through central Baghdad, he betrayed a pang of nervousness. "There's no safe way to travel here," he said, looking out the window.

Even higher education in Iraq has been dangerous business. A soldier guarding Agresto's predecessor, Andrew Erdmann, was shot dead at Baghdad University last summer. Agresto's translator received repeated death threats over the telephone for collaborating with Americans. An Italian in his office who had volunteered to teach at the informatics college was accosted in May by students who pounded on his car and shouted, "American! American!"

After a 15-minute drive, Agresto pulled up at the ministry's temporary offices at the National Informatics Commission. The ministry's headquarters -- an imposing, 12-story building in central Baghdad -- was gutted by looters and has not been rebuilt.

After a round of hugs with ministry officials, Agresto settled into the first meeting between the newly appointed minister of higher education and university presidents. In the past, such gatherings involved the minister lecturing to the presidents. But the new minister, Tahir Bakaa, the former president of Mustansiriya University, announced new procedures.

"The minister will not interfere with the universities," Bakaa told the 25 presidents and institute directors. "The heads of the departments, the deans and the university presidents are in charge of the higher education system. It's not the ministry."

Agresto smiled. It was just what he wanted to hear.

Agresto had made academic freedom a top priority. He believed that the minister of higher education, a political appointee, should not have the power to fire a university president. Students, he insisted, should be protected from religious or political intimidation.

These new policies were included in an academic bill of rights, which the university presidents endorsed this spring. Agresto saw the document as one of his most significant achievements.

Later in the meeting, Agresto distributed copies of a revised education law written by the CPA that included the rights document. He said the CPA had decided not to promulgate the law and instead was giving it to the ministry with the hope that it would be approved by the university presidents and the minister. The changes would have more legitimacy, Agresto figured, if they were enacted by the new minister, rather than the occupation authority.

Bakaa did not endorse the CPA draft, but he promised to take "what's best" from it. It seemed enough to satisfy Agresto.

"When I look at the rest of Iraq, sometimes I get very discouraged," he told the presidents. "But here at this meeting, I'm not discouraged at all."

But in a more reflective and private moment next to the pool, with pipe in hand and Iraq's future on the table, Agresto was far more sober. He said he still believes Iraq will become a democracy, but not the sort of democracy the Bush administration envisions.

"Will it be a free democracy? A liberal democracy?" he said. "I don't think so."

NEXT: Barriers to democracy

Death Stalks An Experiment In Democracy
Fearful Baghdad Council Keeps Public Locked Out

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A01

Last of three articles

BAGHDAD -- The weekly meeting of the Rashid district council began last Wednesday with a prayer for two of the group's 33 members. One was in critical condition at a U.S. military hospital after being shot seven times in an assassination attempt. Another was in hiding after gunmen attacked her house and killed her brother.

"Let us remember our martyrs," Sami Ahmed Sharif, the council chairman, intoned as his fellow members stood, turned their palms to the ceiling and bowed their heads.

There were no other residents of the Rashid district to observe the moment of silence or the rest of the proceedings. Council members voted to close the meeting to the public because of fears that assassins would slip in and mark members for death. To enforce the decision, U.S. and Iraqi soldiers surrounded the council building and stationed snipers on the roof.

The nascent political institutions designed to replace the U.S. administration of Iraq are beset by challenges to their popular legitimacy and effectiveness, and by grave risks to Iraqis who have joined the experiment in representative government. As Iraqis prepare for their country to regain sovereignty, it is uncertain how much their political future will be shaped by the $700 million program in democracy-building that has been at the core of the U.S. occupation.

Inside the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority, which will dissolve with the handover on June 30, some officials express doubts that Iraq's political system will conform to the American blueprints. "Will this develop the way we hope it will?" a CPA official involved in promoting democracy said. "Probably not."

New political institutions to replace Saddam Hussein's Baath Party dictatorship are among the chief legacies of the U.S. occupation. Every city and province has a local council. New mayors, provincial governors and national cabinet ministers have been chosen. The Shiite Muslim majority, shut out of power in Hussein's government, is widely represented, as are religious minorities and women. Hundreds of political parties have formed, and thousands of people have participated in seminars on democracy.

But Iraqis criticize the local councils and the interim national government as illegitimate because their members were not elected. The country's top Shiite cleric has repudiated the interim constitution drafted by the U.S.-appointed Governing Council. In several recent meetings about the country's political future, Iraqis who favor a Western-style democracy have been drowned out by calls for a system governed by Islamic law.

The cabinet, appointed by a U.N. envoy three weeks ago, has had little time to prepare to govern. Local councils, whose authority had been restricted for months by U.S. military commanders, are also stepping into uncharted areas, uncertain about their responsibilities and powers under a system whose inauguration is a week away.

Yet these uncertainties are overshadowed by the imminent threat of violence. Local council members who once welcomed constituents into their homes now keep armed guards at the front gate. Leaders of the national government travel in armored vehicles and work inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, an area off-limits to ordinary Iraqis. Many foreign contractors hired by the U.S. government to promote democracy have either relocated to Kuwait or hunkered down in protected compounds.

Despite those precautions, more than 100 Iraqi government officials have been killed during the occupation, including two members of the Governing Council. Over the past two weeks, the deputy foreign minister and a senior official in the Education Ministry have been assassinated. On Sunday, masked gunmen shot and killed the council chairman of Baghdad's Rusafa district and his deputy as they sat in a cafe.

Teaching Iraqis about democracy has also been risky. Scott Erwin, a 22-year-old CPA staff member, was critically wounded in an ambush this month as he drove away from a Baghdad university where he was teaching a class on democracy. Two CPA employees who worked on civic education initiatives, Fern Holland and Robert Zangas, were shot to death in March near the city of Hilla.

"Iraq may get to a semi-democratic outcome. But the more-democratic outcomes that were possible a year ago are much more difficult to imagine now because of the security situation," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who worked on democracy issues for the CPA before leaving Iraq this spring, in part because of concerns about safety. "This is the biggest tragedy of Iraq."

The Central Mission

The transformation of Iraq from dictatorship to democracy was the central mission of the CPA. Everything else -- the efforts to rebuild infrastructure, train police, revise the school curriculum -- was aimed at building a democratic government that would be a model for the rest of the Middle East.

The U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, initially planned to supervise the entire process. He wanted the CPA to oversee the drafting of a constitution and the convening of general elections. Bremer insisted last summer that the United States would relinquish sovereignty only to a stable, independent, democratically elected Iraqi government.

When escalating violence and dissent by Iraqis led the Bush administration to abandon that plan in November and accelerate the handover, Bremer ordered the CPA to advance democratic goals as far as possible by June 30. He promulgated an interim constitution that included a bill of rights and a commitment to hold elections by January. Local councils whose members had been chosen by the military were authorized to select new members through caucuses. Bremer augmented the $30 million set aside by Congress for democracy promotion with another $700 million to fund political parties, nongovernmental organizations and civics programs to advocate such political values as the separation of church and state, women's rights and federalism.

A key component of the U.S. strategy, starting at the beginning of the occupation, was to create effective grass-roots government. When Hussein was in power, governors, mayors and even municipal police chiefs were appointed by Baghdad. The CPA wanted to change that, starting in the capital city.

The CPA's plan for Baghdad envisioned three tiers of local government: a city council, eight district councils and dozens of neighborhood councils. The councils were limited to advising U.S. officials about reconstruction needs in the city. They had neither the power to enact legislation nor budgets for municipal improvements.

Despite calls from Iraqi politicians for the participants to be chosen by popular vote, the CPA deemed municipal elections too risky last summer. They worried that religious extremists and Baathists would manipulate the process. Instead, the CPA asked the Research Triangle Institute, which had a U.S. government contract to promote democracy in Iraq, to organize neighborhood caucuses to select the councils.

Participants in the caucuses were screened by Americans who supervised the entire process. As a result, the councils were filled with people who owed their jobs more to the CPA than to the public. "The community saw us as tools of the Americans," said Ali Aziz, the secretary of the Rashid council. "It was the beginning of our problems."

Nurturing New Leaders

American officials hope local council members, almost all of whom lived in Iraq while Hussein was in power, will emerge as prominent political figures and potential challengers to the clique of national politicians who opposed Hussein from exile.

"The councils have been a very successful experiment in democracy," said Andrew Morrison, a U.S. diplomat who speaks Arabic and has served as the CPA's governance coordinator for Baghdad.

The composition of the Rashid district council would seem to bear out that assessment. The council, responsible for a large swath of Shiite-dominated southern Baghdad, includes several members with doctoral degrees. Others have important tribal and business connections. Four of the 33 members are women.

Despite their aspirations to seek an elective seat in an eventual national parliament, several council members said that the CPA's limits on their authority had kept them from building the respect they needed to earn the trust and respect of their constituents.

"How can we win the support of the people if we have no money?" said Sharif, the council chairman, a voluble real-estate broker who was encouraged to participate in politics by his friends and neighbors. "If we cannot help them, they will not support us."

When not focused on security, the council's meetings are devoted to discussing work they want the Americans to perform, instead of work they can accomplish themselves. Although they will shed their advisory status to the Americans after June 30, members worry that their limited influence could weaken because there will be fewer U.S.-funded projects and they will have no budget of their own. Over the past four months, the CPA has consulted with the council in allocating more than $56 million for public works projects in the district.

Members faulted the CPA for not keeping a commitment to give a large share of power to local officials. The Rashid council has no control over police officers or many other government employees because they report to national ministries.

Morrison said the division of power between national and local officials would be decided when Iraqis write a permanent constitution. "The Iraqis are going to debate this out over the course of the next year," he said. "We tried to give them the building blocks, but it's one area I'm not sure where it's going to come out."

Among the things the Rashid council plans to do after June 30 is assert its independence from its American sponsors. It has politely disinvited U.S. civilian and military officials, who have attended every council meeting so far, from sessions after that date.

Council members said they envisioned a democracy different from what they have read about the United States, suggesting that many of the concepts Americans have been preaching here have not been accepted. For instance, many said that a separation between religion and the state makes little sense in Iraq.

"We can't act this way," insisted Murthada Younis, the deputy chairman. Outside the room in which he was speaking, several photocopied pictures of a deceased Shiite cleric were taped to the wall. "Religion is part of our life and it should be part of government," he said.

Men on the council said they supported allowing women to vote and hold elective office, but several scoffed at the notion of giving women the same personal freedoms they enjoy outside the Arab world. "In the West, women have absolute freedom to do what they want," said Abbas Taie, an X-ray technician who has attended several U.S.-sponsored democracy workshops. "The Iraqi women refuse such kinds of freedom."

Sharif, the Rashid chairman, said one of the most important items before the council after June 30 will be scheduling local elections. "Right now, many people do not think we are legitimate," he said. "That would change if we were elected by the people."

But Sharif said he recognized that holding an election before the end of the year would be impossible because of the security situation. Campaigning for a January national election will be hard enough, he said. Right now, he said, only a fool would attempt to go door to door or hold a community meeting to meet with constituents. "It's far too dangerous," he said.

Asked who he thought his chief rival would be, he did not pause.

"Terrorism," he said.

'We Need Protection'

After the prayer and the approval of the previous week's minutes, the Rashid council got down to work. The first order of business was to hand out military permits to each member allowing them to carry handguns.

"Our lives are in jeopardy," Sharif said as he distributed the laminated cards.

The U.S. Army had given council members .38-caliber pistols for their protection. But the licenses had expired on April 30, exposing members to arrest if they were searched at a military checkpoint. Sharif said he had continued to pack his pistol, as well as carrying two unlicensed AK-47 assault rifles in his car.

"I'm the chairman, but I violate the law so I can protect myself," he said.

For months, the Rashid district council avoided the violence that had plagued other groups. In the district as a whole, five neighborhood council members have been assassinated this year. In Sadr City, a large Shiite slum, the chairman of the district council was killed and strung from a pole. A sign hanging from his neck accused him of being an American spy.

Rashid council members learned to live with threats and close calls. Yacoub Youssef, the chairman of the education committee, said he had received 14 threats, some written and others by telephone, accusing him of collaborating with U.S. forces. Younis, the deputy chairman, said he was almost gunned down on his way to work last month. "We had been very lucky," he said.

This month, the luck ran out. On June 5, gunmen opened fire on council member Ali Ameri, a professor at Baghdad University, as he drove to work, killing two of his bodyguards and leaving him near death. On June 11, assailants sprayed bullets into the house of a colleague, biologist Nisreen Haider, killing her brother and forcing her into seclusion.

"Serving on this council has become very risky," said Adel Fahdil, a contractor. Although Fahdil insisted he was not worried because he had 20 guards, all armed with AK-47s, other members were not as confident. Most cannot afford a large security detail and are forced to rely on one or two relatives with weapons. They have asked for protection, but U.S. officials answered that they did not have the resources to guard more than 1,200 district and neighborhood councilors across the capital.

"We need someone to help us," said council member Majid Mamouri, who said he could not pay for guards with his salary as a professor of veterinary science. "We need bodyguards. We need protection."

At Wednesday's meeting -- held at a former hunting lodge once run by Hussein's son, Qusay -- only 18 of the council's 33 members were in attendance.

Reached in hiding, Haider said in a telephone interview that she had no intention of returning to the council. "I will not work there anymore," she said. "The people do not deserve to be served."

She said she could no longer live in the Rashid district and planned to move elsewhere in Iraq. "They are watching me, and I expect to be killed," she said.

Ideals and Necessities

Despite the threats, some council members said they were uneasy about excluding the public from their meetings.

"We're working in the name of the citizens," said Youssef, who also serves as a senior official in the Education Ministry. "The public should be able to attend even if we're afraid of them. The citizens have a right to hear what we're doing. We should not be having secret meetings."

But Sharif, a trim man with close-cropped hair and large glasses, argued that the safety of the members was more important. "We must protect the council," he said. "This is not ideal but it is necessary."

These days, he said, "we must do what is necessary for democracy, not what is ideal."

Sharif said he expected the threats to abate after June 30, when the occupation ends and the council assumes greater authority in southern Baghdad. He said he hoped residents and the insurgents would change their opinions of the members when they are working without Americans in the room.

"I don't have any trust in the Americans anymore," Younis said. "I trust my nation to achieve democracy despite terrorism. People know what they want."

While the threats and attacks have scared off some members, they have strengthened the resolve of at least a quorum on the council. With the CPA dissolving and U.S. troops assuming a lower profile, they regard themselves as front-line fighters for democracy.

"If we quit now, the terrorists win," said Youssef, who has been threatened 14 times and was shot at on his way to work last month. Each attempt at intimidation, he said, "gives me the strength to be more determined."