A country in which a U.S.-led multinational military force has authority to "use all necessary measures" to keep peace and fight insurgents, and whose mandate is subject to review by the U.N. Security Council, or by a government installed by an election in January, is a long way from being fully sovereign, whatever the intentions for it to be so.

Give President Bush credit for good intentions, but less credit for acknowledging the very real difficulties standing in the way of implementing those intentions. The barriers are many - historical, geographic, demographic - and the better they are understood, the better the chance to mitigate them and move forward. The administration wants to keep Iraq together as one country, but Iraq has always been so fractious that some people seriously recommend partition.

U.S. troops are facing an insurgency more extensive than just a few remnants from the old regime; controlling it could require putting political objectives ahead of military strategy in a country where violence has long been the path to power.

And the challenge is joined at the very moment the Bush administration faces its national test, a re-election campaign.

LESSONS OF IRAQ'S

MODERN HISTORY

Iraq was formed after the defeat of the old Turkish Ottoman Empire in World War I by combining two former provinces, Sunni-dominated Baghdad and Shia-dominated Basra.

The Kurdish region in the north of Iraq was added in 1925 after it became obvious that a nationalist revolution in Turkey that took control of Kurdish regions in what is now Turkey had eliminated any hope of an independent Kurdish state.

Shia Muslims constitute about 60 percent of Iraq's population. Sunni Arabs account for another 20 percent or so, while Kurds (who are also predominantly Sunni but not Arab) are about 15 percent. Iraqi governments since 1920 or so have been run mainly by Sunnis.

The Kurds, who have never been content to be part of Iraq, have been violently repressed over the years but have never been wiped out. With help from the U.S. and British no-fly zones, the Kurds finally established a semi-autonomous region under Saddam Hussein's rule after the 1991 gulf war. They are unlikely to want to give up the semi-autonomy, but they do want to share in Iraqi oil revenues.

Theoretically, such an ethnically variegated entity could operate as a federalist-like state with strong local autonomy and a relatively weak and tolerant central government. In practice, Iraq has been kept together - before Saddam Hussein and more brutally under Saddam - through a strong and sometimes brutal central government.

The most elementary condition needed for a functioning democracy is effective consent of minorities, based on a belief that the majority will not abuse its power and persecute minorities. That condition might eventually emerge as a final desperate alternative to bloodshed in Iraq, but there is little evidence that it is present now.

The Sunnis are accustomed to exercising power and doing so brutally.

The Kurds want to be left alone - with some oil revenues.

The Shias are biding their time. Whether they will prove tolerant if they gain power through electoral means is an open question; there are strong ties to the theocratic Shia regime in Iran, but it is not a certainty that Iraq's Shias want to duplicate that regime.

That's the situation facing a United States desiring to move toward a representative civil society in Iraq. The British couldn't solve the demographic problem. Successors dealt with it through brutality and repression.

'A CREDIBLE FACADE

FOR OCCUPATION'

With the prisoner-abuse scandal, continuing insurgency, Americans being killed daily and Ahmed Chalabi turning out to be somebody the administration would rather arrest than put in charge of Iraq, one might understand if President Bush had backed off from elaborate promises about a democratic Iraq and the transformation of the Middle East, and he did so just a bit.

Even if the promises now come with caveats, however, the timetable for handover of nominal sovereignty seems unchanged.

Cynics may say it has to do with the administration's political need to have Iraq off the political table by the summer of an election year more than with reality on the ground, and the cynics may be right. It is also possible, however, that sticking to the date fits this administration's and this president's idea of staying with a plan once a decision is made, as a signal of resoluteness.

Whatever the reasons, some form of sovereignty will be handed over to some kind of interim Iraqi government on June 30, but U.S. troops will still be in the country, and the likelihood is that the number will increase somewhat from the 138,000 there today rather then decline. Between then and Jan. 30 a structure will be set up for elections for a transitional national assembly. The elected assembly will draft a new constitution, which will be presented to the Iraqi people in a referendum scheduled for fall 2005. Under the new constitution, Iraq will elect a permanent government by year-end 2005. The transitional government will be fully independent in theory - or at least viewed as more independent than the entity that takes office June 30.

Whatever might be on paper, so long as U.S. troops are in the country and there are more and better-equipped U.S. troops than Iraqi troops, the sovereignty of the interim Iraqi government will be limited. The Cato Institute's Ted Carpenter calls it "a credible facade for continuing U.S. occupation."

"PROBLEMATIC

BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE"

Charles Pena of the Cato Institute says that "the real power struggle will begin July 1," which in his view means that chaos and violence are likely to increase, at least until power relationships are sorted out. That process will be painful, but in some sense it is necessary. Unfortunately, whatever vows might be made about future fealty to democracy, the only way to settle questions of who has real power in Iraq is through direct or indirect violence.

Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute in Oakland believes the only way serious violence and power struggles after June 30 can be avoided is if there is agreement for a loose confederation in Iraq, with considerable local autonomy. "Every group is afraid of being repressed by those who gain ultimate power," he told me, "and with some reason. The Shiites, with a majority, were repressed by Saddam and may think it is time to get some of their own back. The Sunnis and Kurds both worry about this, so the struggle will be intense."

James Dobbins, a State Department veteran (and President Bush's nation-building envoy to Afghanistan after the war) who now heads the Rand Corp.'s International Security and Defense Policy Center, told me there are few practical alternatives to the policy President Bush outlined, but there are numerous pitfalls ahead.

"You don't kill an insurgency by killing insurgents," Dobbins said, "but by getting support from the population and marginalizing the insurgents."

That means putting political objectives ahead of what might seem to be straightforward military objectives. "You can't use artillery or fixed-wing aircraft where there are women or children, or inflict pain to get intelligence," he told me. Instead, you have to establish security first - fewer Iraqis getting killed or feeling vulnerable - and a sense that hope lies within the system being established rather than outside it.

It's a difficult task.

Dobbins thinks the objectives in Iraq are "problematic but not impossible."

Eland envisions - though he doesn't think it likely unless widespread desperation is widely perceived - a partition of Iraq into several smaller geographic states, reflecting religious and ethnic divisions.

There is even a book that describes such a solution in some detail, "The Future of Iraq: Democracy, Dictatorship or Division," by political science professors Liam Anderson of Wright State University and Gareth Stansfield of the University of Exeter in the U.K.

Dobbins thinks Sunnis and Shias are too closely intermingled, especially in Baghdad, for a partition to work at this date. He thinks over the short run a precipitate withdrawal of U.S. troops could lead to a civil war, but over the long run a substantial U.S. military presence will be destabilizing to the country and to the region.

Stability - let's view democracy as something of a dream - will be plenty difficult to establish in Iraq over the next few months. Those outside the system will have every incentive to disrupt the transition. The minimal trust needed to keep most Iraqis inside the system may arise more from a balance of power than from devotion to a democratic ideal.