Graceful exit tougher than swift victory for US in Iraq

If all goes as planned, the U.S. role in Iraq will be greatly diminished in a year. The U.S.-led occupation will end and Iraqis will run the country through an interim government as they write a constitution and prepare for elections. The number of U.S. troops would also be reduced, with Iraqis taking a greater role in providing security.

Despite the capture of Saddam in December, those plans are riddled with uncertainties.

Can the United States reduce its forces and rely on hastily trained Iraqi security forces to fight elusive guerrillas capable of striking almost any target?

Will Iraq be safe enough to allow the economy to grow without billions more from U.S. taxpayers? And can Iraqis with little democratic experience take over the country sooner than the Bush administration had originally planned, then stick to a tight schedule for holding elections and writing a constitution by the end of 2005?

"The challenge is we now have a small window where we really have to convince Iraqis that they are in control," and that the fight between U.S. forces and and Saddam loyalists is a fight for their future, said John Hamre, the No. 2 official in the Pentagon under President Clinton who headed a Pentagon advisory panel on Iraq.

Hamre said the overall situation in Iraq "is far from uniformly bleak," but the security problem is serious.

"My worry is I don't sense that the momentum is on our side," he said.

It's a far cry from the heady days of April after U.S. troops advanced rapidly into Baghdad and Iraqi crowds toppled a 40-foot statue of deposed leader Saddam Hussein.

So much went well for the United States early in the war. The advance was quick, casualties were minimal and Iraqis seemed to welcome the Americans. Food shortages and other expected humanitarian crises never happened.

On May 1, Bush sported a flight suit as he landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and declared major combat over. Speaking under a banner that declared "Mission Accomplished," Bush seemed to be declaring victory.

Democrats fumed then that Bush had staged an elaborate photo opportunity for his re-election campaign. But the tide turned quickly. It ended up being the Democrats who would recall the aircraft carrier landing to argue that an overconfident Bush badly miscalculated the difficulty of bringing peace and stability to Iraq.

After Saddam was toppled, looters rampaged for days. Iraqis became impatient with the slow pace of reconstruction and restoration of basic services. The Pentagon replaced its first civilian administrator, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, less than two months after he arrived. His successor, L. Paul Bremer, disbanded the Iraqi army, a move criticized as making it more difficult to fight anti-American guerrillas.

The very justification for the war was quickly called into question. Bush's main argument for attacking Iraq was that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that could threaten the region and possibly the United States. But even after coalition forces controlled the entire country and interrogated Saddam's former aides and scientists, no weapons have yet been found.

Hopes for large international contributions of money and troops for post-Saddam Iraq also were quickly dashed. U.S. taxpayers continued to shoulder the financial costs of defending and rebuilding Iraq. Congress in November approved an $87 billion package mostly for Iraq on top of $62 billion it provided in April.

The United States continues to have about 130,000 soldiers in Iraq. With additional commitments in Afghanistan, South Korea and elsewhere, concerns have been great about the strain on U.S. forces and how that could affect morale, retention and preparedness to respond to other crises.

It's not clear how the capture of Saddam will affect the level of violence in Iraq. After U.S. forces killed Saddam's sons Odai and Qusai in July, guerrilla attacks against U.S. and allied forces continued to escalate. More coalition troops died in November than in any other month: 104, including 79 Americans.

"I think the key problem the administration faces here is that the Baathists or the holdouts or whoever it is who is conducting this insurgency judges that it can outlast the Americans," said Lee Feinstein, a former Clinton administration official now at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Pentagon has said it expects to reduce American troops in Iraq to just over 100,000 by May. But the training of Iraq's new army to replace U.S. forces has suffered setbacks. A third of the soldiers in the army's first battalion quickly quit.

A recent survey found most Americans don't think U.S. troops should be withdrawn before Iraq has a stable government. But support for the war has weakened and pressure could grow to get more troops home before the November election.

Hamre said he doesn't expect political pressures would prompt Bush to withdraw U.S. forces before Iraqis can provide their own security.

"I think the president instinctively understands that pulling out at this stage could be calamitous to the security in the region," he said. "If all of a sudden we would walk out, we would create a power vacuum."