If At First You Don't Succeed ...

It'

s hard to have an afternoon's uninterrupted fun when you are the National Security Adviser. On Nov. 9, Condoleezza Rice, a passionate football fan, was at FedEx Field outside Washington, watching the Redskins play the Seattle Seahawks, when she got a call from L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the American proconsul in Iraq. For the better part of two weeks, Bremer and Rice had been discussing how to speed the transfer of power to Iraqis. Both agreed that the matter now required face time with Administration principals in Washington. When the conversation resumed the next day, it took just a quick look at calendars—President Bush was off to London for a state visit then to Texas for Thanksgiving, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was about to leave for Asia—for everyone to recognize that Bremer should get back to Washington, fast.

Together with Robert Blackwill, a veteran diplomat who is Rice's point man on Iraq and had been visiting Baghdad, Bremer flew to Washington. So urgent was his trip that he blew off a meeting with Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller, whose troops make up the third largest contingent in the occupying force in Iraq. The two days of meetings in Washington that followed turned out to be fateful. Although Bremer was not directly blamed for the occupation's troubles in Iraq, it was plain that his halo had slipped. The message that Bush gave his fellow gym rat last week, says a senior official, can be reduced to five words: "Let's get on with it." "It" turns out to be a thorough reworking of Bremer's plan to turn power over to the Iraqis.

At a press conference in Baghdad on Saturday, Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader who holds the rotating presidency of the Iraqi Governing Council, announced the new scheme. In effect, Bremer has junked the plan for Iraqi self-rule that he unveiled last summer. Under the original proposal, the council, made up of Iraqi notables appointed by the U.S., was to propose how a constitution might be drafted by December. After the document was written, it would be ratified in a referendum, and only then would a sovereign Iraqi government be elected.

The whole process could have taken up to four years. In recent weeks, however, it had become plain that the council would not meet the December deadline, which had been enshrined in a U.N. Security Council resolution. "They got things built into an impasse. They basically said to us, 'Help us get out of this,'" Bremer told TIMElast week. "We understood the desire for them to have sovereignty more quickly, and we wanted them to have sovereignty. We had to find a way forward."

Under the new plan, the Governing Council will be wound up at the end of May. A national assembly will be elected from Iraq's provinces—the details on how that will happen are still murky—and the assembly will form an executive council. At that time the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which Bremer heads, will dissolve, and sovereignty will be devolved to a provisional Iraqi government. A constitution will follow. At the same time the Administration is preparing to accelerate the transfer of political power to Iraqis, it is also looking for ways to augment Iraqi military capabilities. Sources tell TIME that the Administration is rethinking its opposition to bringing back senior Iraqi army officers who served under Saddam Hussein. The change in plan is more than a minor course correction. It is an admission by the Administration that the basis of its policies since the spring has crumbled. Bremer's initial plan for transferring power to Iraqis had seven points, which should have been a warning. Any seven-step program is almost by definition a leisurely one. The Administration hoped to take the process of nation building slowly, first building up the institutions of civil society—courts, a free press, a constitution, habits of consensus rather than confrontation. Only after the invisible infrastructure of a modern state had been established would Iraq move to elections for a government and sovereignty. But that idea involved one fatal conceit: that the clock would move at a speed of the Administration's choosing. Dominique de Villepin, the French Foreign Minister, said acidly last week, "The American representatives on the ground continue to use the language of all the world's occupation regimes—'Just a little more time.'"