Adjusting, persevering.(At War)(Paul Bremer)

PAUL BREMER, the American administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, made a quick trip to Washington to meet with President Bush, and emerged with a new plan for reconstructing Iraq, one that would turn power over to an Iraqi government by June 2004. At the same time, the Pentagon announced that the total number of American troops in Iraq would be cut by one-fifth next year.

Does the Bush administration have the wind up? Is it planning for a headline-free Republican convention in the summer of 2004? Is America thinking of an exit strategy? Are the jihadists, who drew such encouraging conclusions from Somalia, thinking of victory?

Bremer and Bush insisted that we would be in Iraq for as long as necessary--"We're not leaving until the job is done, pure and simple," Bush said--and that our troops would keep fighting Baathists and jihadists, even after sovereignty had been transferred. (American troops, by way of comparison, have been in Germany half a century and counting after the occupation ceased.) There is much that our troops can usefully accomplish, if they follow the proven strategies of counterinsurgency, working with local militias and focusing on intelligence and the turning of enemies. One of the most robust myths of Vietnam is that guerrillas always win in the end, but Britain's successful experience with Communist rebels in Malaysia gives it the lie. So do our own successes in Vietnam, in programs like Phoenix and the Kit Carson Scouts. We lost in Vietnam because the elite lost heart after the Tet offensive, a conventional military battle; but the main reason the Communists launched Tet was that we had successfully eviscerated the Vietcong.

Is the shift in the political timetable prudent? Our old plan called for an Iraqi constitution to be written before the election of a provisional government. Now we have reversed the process. Bremer insists that there will be an interim ...