Chaos in Iraq

PARIS - It is hard to see where the Bush administration thinks it is going in Iraq, or whether it grasps how much its dissimulation and bad faith over the Israeli-Palestinian "road map" will cost it.

The situation in Iraq, even by friendly accounts, seems to be deteriorating, and unfriendly accounts in both the British and the French press are scathing.

Major combat was pronounced finished a month ago, but U.S. authorities in Baghdad, seemingly still confused or in dispute over how to restore order and a functioning administration, have yet to get a grip on the situation. Visitors to U.S. military headquarters in Baghdad, situated in one of Saddam's former palaces, are given elaborate PowerPoint presentations on the military security situation, irrelevant to the reigning lawlessness and disorder Baghdad's citizens experience. U.S. officials go out only in escorted convoys.

The civilian authority run by the newly arrived ambassador L. Paul Bremer, still locked in its own and Washington's bureaucratic struggle over what to do and whom to blame, remains inaccessible to aid organizations and nongovernmental representatives.

Meanwhile, electricity remains erratic. Few city service workers are being paid. The water doesn't pump, and sewage and waste collection is not restored. The Wall Street Journal reported that income from Iraq's oil production could fall short of what is needed for reconstruction "for years to come."

Many important sites remain unsecured, the hospitals are in disastrous condition and the banks remain closed. Black markets have grown active, and inflation is setting in. Fires keep breaking out, and there is an open trade in assault rifles and grenades. Only half of Baghdad's police have returned to duty, and they were denied arms until last Monday.

Journalists and aid officials still wear flak jackets, mainly out of fear of being shot when approaching U.S. checkpoints, where soldiers fear suicide bombers. There is trouble between Kurds and Arabs in northern Iraq. Cholera has appeared in Basra. And no weapons of mass destruction have been found.

No one was prepared for this. During World War II, by contrast, the allied advance in Europe was closely accompanied by civil affairs and military police able to take control of liberated cities and re-establish administration and public services.

Today's Defense Department planners seem to have thought they could decapitate a functioning state administration and afterward give it new orders. Or perhaps they thought the returning exiles would take over the country. How they reconciled this insouciance about the occupation with their simultaneously expressed fears of heavy fighting in Baghdad and other cities is a mystery.

Less of a mystery is why they spurned the United Nations, with its extensive apparatus and experience of civil relief and reconstruction. They could have invited the UN in the day the fighting stopped, but they wanted to "punish" and discredit the organization. Such pettiness and hubris square badly with anarchy and cholera.

The Bush administration also promised a free Palestinian state. But Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says Israel's policy on controlling and settling the West Bank and Gaza will not change. No American government has ever approved the policy of colonizing the occupied territories, he said, and while every Israeli government has gone on building settlements, no U.S. administration had tried to stop it. Today, he noted, "there is no pressure from anyone."

It would be a miracle if there were pressure from the Bush administration. Yet Tony Blair is very close to having bet his prime ministership on President George W. Bush's having been in good faith when promising to back the road map. The map includes a settlement freeze, followed by Israeli withdrawals.

The European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States negotiated the road map together and committed themselves to follow through on it. But the Bush administration, The New York Times has reported, "is setting the plan aside for now." It was signed only to humor the others during the buildup to the Iraq war.