The No. 1 Priority

Be

careful what you wish for, Mr. President. Now that he has won re-election, the bloody mess in Iraq remains George W. Bush's No. 1 responsibility and the one most likely to define his presidential legacy. The British experience occupying the country in the 1920s offers unhappy instruction. That expedition's commander thought he went as a liberator and arrived with scant ground troops. The local leaders the British picked to rule were weak and derided as puppets. Iraqis rebelled with attacks that stunned the occupiers in their ferocity. Ultimately, the occupiers had to use brute military power to crush the insurgency, hoping that stories of men, women and children being killed indiscriminately wouldn't cause the public back home to lose its nerve. Quelling the dissent proved deadly for 2,200 British troops and some 10,000 Iraqis, and the country never did settle down by the time the British left in the 1940s.

Nation building is exceedingly tough, which in part is why Bush ran against the concept in 2000. This year he claimed he could turn the U.S.'s troubled Iraq enterprise into some kind of success. His Administration's broad failure to adequately plan for the postwar peace left him to tack and turn as the occupation went sour. On the stump, Bush brushed all that aside with loads of optimistic rhetoric about Iraq's democratic future, but his policy is still more sentiment than strategy. Back in the Oval Office, he's going to have to start filling in the details in earnest.

As of now, the Bush plan for Iraq, Part 2 consists primarily of doing more of what his Administration tried to do in his first term: get more international help, accelerate the training of an Iraqi security force to take over, jump-start reconstruction and hold fair, credible elections in January. Washington officials sum it up as "Iraqification," the process of getting the U.S. out by shifting the political and security burden to locals. But as just about everyone who knows Iraq warns, that could take years, if it works at all. If Bush intends to see the job through, as he insists, he needs to do two things quickly: make a realistic appraisal of the current situation and put in place contingency plans for what could go wrong.

FACTS ON THE GROUND Bush campaigned on assurances that "freedom is on the march" and "we're making progress" in Iraq. But the country is plagued by insecurity. Most reliable estimates put Iraqi deaths at about 15,000 since the war began. Analysts inside and outside Iraq say Bush needs to come to grips with the fact that the insurgency is growing more efficient and more professional, its footprint keeps widening and its ability to spread carnage keeps increasing. Publicly, U.S. officials estimate that some 12,000 insurgents are under arms, but privately they say the number may be closer to 20,000. The violence has throttled reconstruction programs that might once have won the U.S. a base of support, and it's hard to see how even the most eager rebuilder could get repairs back on track before the country is pacified.Even Pentagon officials privately concede that the U.S. is just muddling along. The unanticipated vicissitudes of the warfare have so far allowed for only short-term tactical decisions, and an endgame by definition is constantly evolving. Now the military is probing and testing fresh options for quelling violence: "Do we negotiate in Ramadi while bombing Fallujah," asks a senior official, "or vice versa?"

U.S. troops could be pondering questions like that for years. The Pentagon is planning to maintain in Iraq a force of the current size—138,000—for the next two years. And the top brass will probably boost the numbers to almost 160,000 for the next three months to bolster security for Iraq's elections. The Army's top officer conceded last week that the current 12-month tours in Iraq cannot be scaled back to six or nine months, as the White House wanted. The long deployments are pinching recruitment and retention, especially as veterans contemplate returning to Iraq for the second or third time. At some point Bush will have to address where the manpower for a prolonged conflict will come from—perhaps by abandoning the Administration's resistance to proposals aimed at expanding the Army.

ELECTION PITFALLS Most immediately, the bloodshed threatens to upend Iraq's January elections, an essential step toward Bush's goal of creating a stable nation. There's little question that with Bush in charge, the vote will happen on schedule. Yet pulling it off in a broadly credible fashion presents a daunting challenge. For the most restive parts of the Sunni triangle, the latest U.S. plan is to entice Sunni rejectionists to join the political process while at the same time fight to eliminate unrelenting jihadis. The U.S. will need to take back 22 rebel-held cities, by force where necessary, if residents there are to have any hope of voting. Then comes the even more hazardous job of maintaining the upper hand in the face of harassment by insurgents. The Administration is counting on newly trained Iraqi forces to take over day-to-day security tasks as the year progresses. U.S. officers say the quality of the Iraqis' performance is improving all the time, and during the campaign, Bush claimed that 145,000 of them would be mission ready by the end of the year.