"They Didn't Want To Wait"

By Brian Bennett, Romesh Ratnesar, Vivienne Walt

According to the timetable laid out in the plan, an Iraqi government will be in place by June 2004. Is the American occupation over at that point?

Yes. The deadlines are just an agreement between us and the Governing Council, but I think we all intend to stick to them. There will be a transitional legislature by the end of May. The assembly then will elect a transitional government, which is fully sovereign by the end of June. Once we cede sovereignty, as a matter of law, the occupation ends.

President Bush has said, "We'll stay until the job is done." What specifically constitutes the job being done? Can you hand over authority to a sovereign government, for example, without finding Saddam Hussein or the weapons of mass destruction?

The American government will not leave. We intend to have an agreement with the new Iraqi government in which it will ask for our continued assistance in the security of Iraq. That will establish the terms in which our troops will stay here.

Was the urgency for setting the timetable this week prompted by the leaked CIA intelligence report that suggested the resistance is growing stronger and the U.S. is losing credibility in the eyes of Iraqis?

No. No, this has been on its own timeline related to political discussions we've been having with the Governing Council. They, like us, preferred to proceed with a permanent constitution followed by an election. But they found that they had to take a census, and that could take a year. They didn't want to wait that long. So they got things built into an impasse. They basically said to us, "Help us get out of this." These discussions really happened in the last 10 days, before the event you're talking about.

Will announcing the date for the end of the occupation take the wind out of the sails of the resistance?

I certainly hope that it will help with the security situation. But that remains to be seen. Part of our effort here is to get the Iraqis more engaged in security and in gathering intelligence. I think the military strategy of getting Iraqis to take responsibility over their own security has already begun to yield dividends in terms of finding out where the bad guys are.

Once the coalition hands over power, won't Iraq still need an effective Iraqi army in order to provide national security and combat the threat of international terrorists?

They'll have an army. But that is not a necessary attribute of sovereignty. There are governments all over the world that don't have armies. Liechtenstein comes to mind.

Do you plan to consult high-ranking members of the former regime's army?

If you look at the army so far, 60% of the recruits are from the old army, and 100% of the officers and NCOs are from the old army. So we are involving the old army in building up the new one. We want to be careful about bringing senior officers back into the army, because they tend to be tainted by some of the excesses of the previous regime.

One criticism of the occupation is that the U.S. has not allowed Iraqis to make their own mistakes. Should the U.S. have given them more responsibility sooner?

They've had very significant authority over their country once we got the ministries stood up in the middle of June. They do the budget. They appoint personnel. They decide policy. They are an able group of people. And they've made mistakes, and I'm sure they will continue to make mistakes.