As US exits, can Iraqis deliver?

Capt. Roger Maynulet didn't know that liberating Iraq would involve so many photo ops. Yet here he is in a baroque Arab wedding hall in Baghdad for the Hay Somer neighborhood council Christmas party, and he's just upstaged "Papa Noel." Sitting in the bower where newlyweds usually receive their guests, the burly Maynulet is besieged by excited kids clambering over him while laughing parents snap pictures. In between shots, council members and residents whisper in his ear, pressing ideas for neighborhood improvements but also eager to be seen with the American soldier.

This is the occupation the US war-planners had promised, tangible evidence of Iraqis and Americans working towards a better future. But the good feeling in Hay Somer conceals a looming danger for America's most ambitious nation-building project since the end of the cold war.

Across Iraq, the US military has set up hundreds of local councils to serve as the building blocks for Iraq's new political culture. But the Councils have been reliant on their military patrons for what little progress they've made.

A close look at two Baghdad councils - Hay Somer, a middle class neighborhood that is almost half Christian, and Sheikh Maruf, a scruffier and mostly Shiite area - shows that Iraq is filled with courageous people committed to the idea of democracy, but that their efforts are opposed by powerful institutions and habits that can't be changed overnight.

As the Bush Administration moves toward returning sovereignty to Iraq - critics say rushing headlong - Iraq's neighborhood councils provide a tool for measuring whether Iraqi democracy is going to work. The US wants a transitional government to be selected by the middle of the year in a process that will be largely controlled by the Governing Council the US appointed in the middle of last year. Powerful Shiite clerics feel the Governing Council is a US tool, and want free elections to be held by June.

This week, the Governing Council began a series of nationwide town-hall meetings to test the US-backed transition plan, and the United Nations said it would send in a team to determine if America's contention that it's too soon for elections is correct.

But whatever plan is ultimately executed, the ability of hundreds of average Iraqis to prove they can run their own affairs after decades of authoritarian governments designed to punish initiative and community leadership will be tested. Iraqis will either see democracy work or Iraq fall back into the pattern of autocratic and unstable leadership so familiar in the middle east.

In the months ahead, the Monitor will track these two councils as a window into this process. The slow withdrawal of the US presence in Iraq will change the way the councils work; Maynulet and his counterparts across the country are slowly pulling back from their councils, weaning them from their reliance on US military support.

But with some apprehension. In Hay Somer, Maynulet says he's been gratified by the steps taken so far. "When this started, it consisted of me sitting at the head of the table and basically telling people how things were going to be,'' he says. "As we've gone forward, they've taken more of the initiative and now I'm sitting at the side of the room."

But he's also worried about whether the council is ready to take the last step, and stand up to central government institutions designed to dictate to citizens, rather than to cooperate and listen. "The big question is how much authority the [councils] will be able to carve out for themselves," he says. "The refusal of the municipal government to work with them has been a recurring problem."

There are also public expectations that are almost impossible to meet - most Iraqi adults believe the government exists to provide jobs and subsidies, and remember the glory days of the early 1980s before the devastating war with Iran, when Hussein's government channeled oil money into subsidized refrigerators and televisions.

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