The Bush administration is facing severe challenges in Iraq over a number of thorny issues, among them restoring peace and stability to the country and handling the sensitive relationship between US troops and the Iraqi interim government after the handover of power to the Iraqis.

HOW TO RESTORE PEACE, STABILITY IN IRAQ

US President George W. Bush has said that the 138,000-strong US force will remain in Iraq "as long as necessary" to help bring security to Iraq but the US presence has so far failed to bring peace and stability to the country more than a year after Bush declared an end to "major combat operations" in Iraq on May 1, 2003.

Realizing that military might is not the only solution for putting down the Iraqi insurgency, Bush, who has branded Iraq's radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr a thug and vowed to crush him and his militia, surprisingly said on June 15 that the United States would not deny Sadr a role in Iraqi politics. Iraq's interim president Ghazi Yawar followed suit by urging Sadr to lay down his arms and enter Iraqi politics.

As a result, Sadr on June 16 ordered members of his militia fighting US troops to return home and expressed his intention of founding a political party to contest national elections slated for early next year.

It is not merely a military matter on how to put down the insurgency in Iraq, said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow of foreign policy studies at the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

"We need to also make progress on economics, politics and military operations to be able to stop the insurgency," O'Hanlon said, noting that more employment in Iraq would help reduce the high level of violence and crime on the streets.

"We need to improve security, we need to improve economy, we also need to give the Iraqi government a real sense of decision-making power and sovereignty," O'Hanlon said.

HOW TO HANDLE US TROOPS - IRAQI GOVERNMENT RELATIONS

"The relationship between the US troops and the Iraqi interim government is going to be a very difficult issue. It is probably going to be the number one area of disagreement between the US military command and the Iraqi interim government in the coming months," Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, told Xinhua.

"The US military commanders have long resisted any kind of foreign control over US forces, yet the Iraqi government does not want the US military to operate without any external control at all," Carpenter said.

Bush administration officials have said that even after the power transfer, US forces in Iraq will take military decisions freely, meaning that the Iraqi interim government will have no veto over any US military operations in the future.

On the other hand, the Iraqi interim government, eager to win credibility from fellow Iraqis, is likely to keep a respectable distance from the US forces and may not be totally obedient to the US command.

"The Iraqi interim government may have to satisfy the Iraqi constituency that is increasingly restless and that increasingly wants the United States and the coalition forces to leave their country," Carpenter said.

"The most important thing is that we realize that on the most difficult or most potentially controversial operations, we need to have the Iraqis fully supportive of what we are doing. We have to treat the Iraqi government as if they have the veto over the most sensitive operations, even if they do not formally have," O'Hanlon said.

Moreover, the fact that in Baghdad the United States will have one of the largest US embassies in the world "is strong evidence that the United States still intends to exercise a lot of influence behind the scenes," Carpenter said.

John Negroponte, the first US ambassador to post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, was formally sworn in to that position on June 23 to head a US embassy with 700-1,000 American staff.

HOW TO LET UN PLAY A ROLE

The Bush administration had to resort to the "irrelevant" United Nations after the US-dominated Iraq reconstruction process hit trouble. President Bush, along with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, agreed at a joint press conference at the White House on April 16to let the United Nations play a central role in Iraq.

Realizing that an Iraqi government hand-picked by the United States would lack legitimacy, the Bush administration eagerly welcomed the UN role in Iraq. As a result, the Iraqi interim government established on June 1 and which formally took power on June 28 is largely the handiwork of UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi.

"The UN role in Iraq should be greater than now. The United Nations should be the principal international adviser to the Iraqi government," O'Hanlon said.

But to Carpenter, the United States wants the world body to play a role that "serves US purposes."

"It is not, in any way, enthusiastic about having the United Nations play an independent role, much less a controlling role," Carpenter said.

Such a prospect is not to the liking of either the Iraqis or UN Secretary General Kofi Annan who said on June 17 that the Iraqi situation was still too dangerous for the United Nations to return.

The problems facing the Bush administration's aim to build a "free, democratic and prosperous" Iraq to serve as a model to the Middle East, reinforces the view that the plan has a long way to go and difficult choices will have to be made.

Even more troublesome for the Bush administration is that a fully democratic Iraq may not be pro-US at all.

"We will see what the national elections produce next year...there is certainly a possibility that radical Islamic forces might be rather strong in the permanent government selected at that time.

That will not make the United States happy at all," Carpenter said.

Source: Xinhua