Iraq will the U.S. win the peace? Why guerilla attacks and political challenges to American policy are making staying the course the hardest battle of all.

• Author: Tyler, Patrick E.
• Position: International

Some prominent Americans said this time would come, and now it is here: the season when American staying power in Iraq is being seriously tested.

In Congress, many Republicans are joining Democrats to challenge President George W. Bush's decision to spend billions on Iraq's reconstruction without any commitment for repayment from this oil-rich land. The American military is as overextended as it has been since the war in Vietnam, with tens of thousands of reservists called up for duty and facing career and family dislocations. The United Nations, charged with helping to rebuild the country, is fleeing 'after a vicious car-bomb attack in Baghdad killed some of its best and brightest diplomats. Many humanitarian organizations are following.

And Iraqis--even those who welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein--are rebelling against occupation. In a recent poll, more Iraqis said they admire French President Jacques Chirac than Bush.

Yet on the ground here, despite the staccato of gunfire in the night, optimism has never been stronger that Iraqis will pull through, if America can find a formula for letting them take control of their destiny as the allied armies and occupation administrators recede.

The streets of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul bustle with commerce. Restaurants are filled late into the night as the summer heat abates along with the fear of crime. Schools, many refurbished with American help, reopened last month. New textbooks, cleansed of Saddam's image, are being printed. The curfew has been extended an hour, until midnight.

Iraqis are voting with their feet, figuring that it is time to reopen their shops because the violence here is not directed at them, hut at the American military and, to a lesser extent, at Iraq's new police and politicians.

Still, consensus in postwar Iraq is as elusive as Saddam, who remains in hiding almost six months after the end of his regime. And the war over Iraq policy has moved into a complex phase.

There are three wars, really: the guerrilla campaign inside Iraq, the diplomatic war between the United States and the international community over nation building and peace-keeping, and the partisan war in Washington, where Bush's critics are challenging almost everything about the course he charted here in Iraq.

RESISTANCE TO THE OCCUPATION

The war inside Iraq is now about resistance to the American and allied occupation. Resistance began growing in May, soon after Bush declared the end of fighting against Saddam's organized forces. At that time, the Bush administration decided against handing power immediately to a provisional government, and opted for a lengthy occupation strategy.

The decision, made in the Oval Office, was announced with the arrival of the occupation administrator, L. Paul Bremer III. There was no consultation with Iraqis. Now many Iraqi political figures say the failure to consult them makes them question Bush's intentions, despite the President's declared commitment to rebuild the state as a democracy.

The occupation model put American troops into direct confrontation with the minority of Iraqis who want to...