The Quagmire

"I talk to senior military people and combat commanders who tell me that the situation is much more precarious than admitted," says Col. Patrick Lang, former Middle East chief for the Defense Intelligence Agency. "Even inside the Green Zone you are not safe, because of indirect fire. And if you were to venture outside at night, they'd probably find your headless body the next morning."

Car bombs rock Baghdad and other cities virtually every day, and insurgents conduct hundreds of attacks each week on U.S. troops, Iraqi recruits and civilian police. Thousands of Iraqi police and soldiers have scattered or disappeared, and countless others either do no fighting or covertly support the insurgency. The out-of-control security situation means that few reconstruction projects can get off the ground. Transport is crippled, and Iraq's core infrastructure -- its roads and bridges, its power plants, its water-treatment facilities, and its all-important oil fields, pipelines and oil terminals -- remains heavily damaged from the war.

According to U.S. officials, the resistance attacks are being aided by an extensive network of informers. Insurgents, apparently making use of engineers and former insiders, have been able to hit oil installations and power plants expertly, foiling U.S. efforts to sustain Iraqi oil exports and to provide electricity and water to Iraqi cities. "They have tentacles that reach all through the new government and the new military," Lt. Gen. Walter Buchanan, who commands U.S. air forces in the Persian Gulf, admitted recently.

The new government is not only powerless to stop the attacks by insurgents, it is dominated by the same clique of warlords and exiles who lobbied the Pentagon to go to war in the first place, many of whom have close ties to the warring camps that control vast parts of the country. "In the Arab world, Iraq is seen as a zone of chaos in a pre-civil-war situation, held together only by the U.S. occupation," says Chas Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under Bush's father. A brief survey of the three major forces in Iraq -- Shiites in the south, Sunnis in the center and Kurds in the north -- makes clear the sharp divisions that threaten to blow the country apart:

The Shiites: The Bush administration's plan for reconstruction envisioned the Shiites -- the majority population long oppressed by Saddam Hussein -- as the chief power in a democratic Iraq. The United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite party backed by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, won a majority in the new national assembly. But a militant bloc of fundamentalist Shiites has been using its newfound strength -- and its street thugs -- to forcibly impose Islamic law throughout the southern half of Iraq. Militias loyal to rival Shiite factions are blowing up liquor stores and movie theaters, forcing women to wear ultraconservative Islamic dress and assassinating secular officials and other opponents.