Can the Iraqis police Iraq?

But the intelligence officials say the U.S. can't really determine if there has been a significant influx of Islamists or terrorists into the country. And if foreigners are behind even some of the attacks, says an Administration official, "it makes this a much more difficult thing, if they have safe haven and resources outside Iraq." That, he adds, "makes it immaterial what you achieve inside Iraq."

No matter who is orchestrating the violence, the U.S. hopes to calm things down by rapidly turning over to Iraqis more responsibility for policing their country. State Department officials note that this has always been the ultimate exit strategy. But Bush's team has long been divided over the exact approach. Before the war, there was a contentious debate about the role of Iraqi security forces once major fighting ended. The State Department and the cia pushed hard for a strategy that would remove only the top layers of Iraq's army and keep most of the rank-and-file intact. They argued that the army was the country's most important unifying national organization, able to transcend ethnic and religious divides.

A former deputy to Jay Garner, the first, short-lived civilian administrator in Iraq, says he thought the plan was to employ most of the soldiers in reconstruction tasks after Saddam fell. But civilians at the Pentagon and in the office of the Vice President agreed with Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the former exile opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, that full de-Baathification of the military was essential. In May, two weeks after Bremer took over as proconsul in Baghdad, he ordered the army completely demobilized. Many U.S. officials involved in post-Saddam Iraq now feel this was a poor decision, sending a vast number of experienced soldiers home, jobless and armed. For months the State Department and cia have argued for remobilizing as fast as possible. But when lawmakers gathered in the secret S-407 briefing room on Capitol Hill last week to press the point on Bremer, he made it clear that recalling the soldiers was not on. "They made a decision to disband these guys and not use them," said a lawmaker in attendance. Reconstituting the army "would be admitting they made a mistake."

Instead, the White House is pushing the Pentagon to transform thousands of Iraqi security guards into paramilitary police officers. Capable militiamen account for only 5,000 of the 90,000 Iraqis now undertaking some sort of security work alongside U.S. forces. The Administration wants to triple the number in three months. That would require training these guards in a scant few weeks.

Bush aides think the advantage of relying more on locals is that Arabic speakers who know the people and the terrain would do a better job uncovering threats in advance than Americans. "We understand the minds of these killers," says Lieut. Colonel Salam Zajey, commander of Baghdad's al-Bayaa police station, where 15 people died in one of last week's bombings. "We lived with them for 20 years. We trained them. That should help us in fighting them."

On a visit to al-Bayaa station last week, Baghdad police chief Hassan al-Obeidi told his men, "Look, if we can get control of the streets and bring back security here, we can tell the Americans goodbye. Nobody would be happier to say it than I." And no one would be happier to hear it than the occupiers.

—With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/ Washington and Hassan Fattah, Romesh Ratnesar and Simon Robinson/Baghdad