Administration officials deny that fear about a possible terrorist attack on Wednesday prompted the ceremony to be moved up two days. An anonymous senior State Department official, during a Monday background briefing, said, "All the critics, months ago, were saying, you're never going to make the June 30th deadline, you're going to have to push it back, you should push it back, just push it back. And, in fact, what they're demonstrating to the Iraqi people and to the world is, no, we're ready, and we're ready ahead of schedule.'"

Whether or not there was a connection to fears of terrorism, another reason to move up the transfer of power, says Amy Hawthorne, a Middle Eastern expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, may have been so that it would occur while the NATO summit was taking place -- at which Bush pressed allies to play a bigger role in the reconstruction of Iraq, specifically in providing training for Iraqi security forces.

Bush can use all the allies he can get. Monday's transfer of power comes at a time when a majority of Americans say the war in Iraq was a mistake and that it has made the United States less safe, not more secure. A CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll released Monday shows that by a margin of 2-to-1, Americans do not think that the turnover of political control to Iraqis is a sign of success for the Bush administration because Iraq's long-term stability remains in serious question. Sixty percent of those polled doubt that security will be established in Iraq in the next year.

The view from within Iraq is even more pessimistic. While a USA Today-CNN-Gallup poll in April indicated that 71 percent of Iraqis saw the U.S.-led coalition as "occupiers," a poll conducted in May for the CPA shows grimmer numbers: 92 percent of Iraqis consider the U.S.-led forces to be "occupiers." And 55 percent of Iraqis told pollsters they would feel safer if U.S. troops left immediately.

Bamford says that's exactly what the United States has to do -- pull the troops out -- if the new Iraqi government is going to stand a chance of succeeding. "As long as Americans are there, there will not be a reduction, but an expansion, of the violence. It's Americans' presence in Iraq that's causing the violence. The United States needs to define an exit strategy: [Now] that we've successfully transferred power, we're going to pull out 20,000 troops per month while bringing in other allied forces to replace them. What's the alternative? Stay forever? Right now it's a quagmire, with no end in sight. Vietnam was the same way."

Charles Maynes, president of the Eurasia Foundation and former editor of Foreign Policy magazine, pinpoints the dilemma: "The new government depends on the United States for its military power, yet it lacks legitimacy so long as this is true. The longer the U.S. remains in Iraq, the more difficult the position of the new government is likely to be. The reason is that the U.S. military, to defend itself, will have to continue killing Iraqis, a perfectly legitimate act of self-defense for which the local authorities will be blamed."

A sovereign government without complete sovereignty, let alone its own army, battling insurrection and possible civil war. Says Hawthorne at Carnegie, "There are all kinds of land [mines] ... ahead for this government."

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