A Tenuous Grip on Sovereignty

BAGHDAD — On a busy commercial strip, U.S. soldiers cajole a ragged band of reluctant Iraqi army recruits to take charge of their own streets. In the highest corridors of power, U.S. officials press Iraqi politicians to meet political deadlines. A year after occupation authority head L. Paul Bremer III handed the formal reins to an appointed Iraqi government, private military firms contracted by the Pentagon continue to wield guns with scant regard for Iraqi authorities.

But long gone are the days when U.S. and British officials of Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority controlled all aspects of the Iraqi state. Ministries that oversee Iraq's natural resources, energy reserves, schools, hospitals and finances have evolved over the last year into vigorous players in Iraq's daily life. And elected Iraqi politicians are devising their own constitution with little direct involvement by U.S. officials.

"We cannot any longer simply dictate, but have to lobby, persuade, cajole and implore," says Larry Diamond, a former Baghdad-based CPA official who is now a scholar at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. "At the same time, how independent can the government really be when it is still largely, in fact utterly, dependent on American troops for its security? Ultimately, full independence will only come when this dependence on the U.S. for security ends."

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Bremer handed formal control of Iraq over to the interim government of former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi in a low-key June 28, 2004, ceremony that lasted less than 20 minutes. But the reality of Iraqis taking control of their own streets, government and borders has been a longer and more tangled story.

Sovereignty -- a nation's control over its affairs and territories -- is about symbols of national pride, and command over physical space and decision-making. U.S. Embassy officials continue to occupy the same Republican Palace from which Bremer, and Saddam Hussein before him, ran the country. It lies within the Green Zone, a four-square-mile fortress in the heart of the nation's capital controlled by the U.S. military.

Many Iraqi ministries are also within the Green Zone. Though the Western officials who ran them in the wake of the March 2003 invasion are now gone, new Westerners have taken on roles as advisors or consultants, some of them paid directly out of the Iraqi public treasury.