Unfinished Business

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The 80 leaders who met the next morning represented just a first round: about one-third were Iraqi exiles; the rest were drawn from inside the country. "At the beginning there was a sense of a standoff between the outsiders and the insiders, but as the day wore on, you saw them sitting down with each other at the tables. I thought that was a good thing," says Garner. One Shi'ite cleric stood up and quoted Abraham Lincoln, much to Garner's delight.

But outside the tent, people weren't exactly celebrating. Thousands gathered to denounce the process or demand to know why they had been excluded. After Friday prayers, protesters swarmed the streets of Baghdad calling for Muslim unity. When a U.S. Marine patrol wandered around a corner into a Baghdad street filled with worshippers spilling out of a Sunni mosque, the flashes of anger and the wrestling for power captured in a second the challenge that American forces face. WE REJECT FOREIGN CONTROL, read the banners. The sheik's sermon was a hymn to nationalism: Do not try to divide Sunni from Shi'ite, he said; we are all united in our desire to create an Islamic state free of both Saddam and America.

At the sight of the U.S. forces, worshippers rose and formed a wall to block them. The Marines did not understand Arabic, but they did not need to: the angry shouting made it clear that they were not welcome. A staff sergeant tried to calm the crowd, telling demonstrators, who did not speak English, that his troops meant no harm. He finally lost his temper when an Iraqi said, "You must go." "I have the weapons," the sergeant replied. "You back off."

One stone tossed, one shot fired could have led to disaster. But the Marines retreated cautiously around the corner as the faithful were held back by their own men. Women peered at the soldiers from behind cracked-open doors, and children waved to them and gave them a thumbs-up as both sides edged back, for now. This is a new moment, a new mission, for the Iraqi people and for the soldiers in their midst, and the challenge for both is likely to grow as the future takes root. --Reported by Brian Bennett, Aparisim Ghosh, Simon Robinson and Nir Rosen/Baghdad, Michael Weisskopf/Doha, Terry McCarthy/Kuwait City, Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson and Mark Thompson/Washington