Judging from rhetoric out of Washington, the United States expects to be welcomed with open arms in Iraq as the country that liberated the people from a horrible, repressive regime. The troubles with this assumption are many:

1. No one is eager to replace the Hussein dictatorship with a benevolent U.S. military government.

2. Each faction -- Kurd, Shiite and Sunni -- wants and plans to seize their piece of the pie in post-Hussein Iraq. Because the United States does not want the country to disintegrate, it cannot allow this, and it immediately will be drawn into suppressing independence bids and power grabs.

3. Other countries, most notably Turkey, have interests in ensuring that a Kurdish state does not coalesce, and will act accordingly.

4. Iraq is surrounded by neighbors hostile to U.S. goals in the region and with proxy forces inside Iraq.

5. Iraq's borders are porous, and al Qaeda will be quick to exploit this route to a sea of U.S. military targets.

6. U.S. security concerns regarding defense of its forces against al Qaeda and hostile Iraqi factions will require increasingly draconian controls in Iraq, either by U.S. forces or by an Iraqi proxy, intensifying opposition.

7. And no faction will be amused at the United States siphoning off Iraq's oil wealth.

All this adds up to a messy and protracted occupation. Perhaps opposition will not spring up immediately, though we expect the Kurds to move quickly to secure their territorial gains. But as the United States settles in to dual missions in Iraq -- nation rebuilding and regional power projection -- the key question is, will the occupation be so messy as to become the main event, distracting Washington from its primary goal of power projection?

In the most successful instances of occupation and reconstruction the United States has had -- Japan and Germany -- one of the key aspects was continuity. In Japan's case, the bureaucracy continued to function under occupation. In Germany, although there was massive reorganization, the vast majority of pre-occupation personnel continued to be deployed. The problem with Iraq is that, first, it does not have a deep reservoir of institutional and individual capabilities to draw upon. Second, the much smaller pool is therefore more directly, individually complicit with the regime being replaced.

Washington's dilemma is simply this: It can adopt Iraq's existing bureaucracy, officially declare it de-Husseined and govern through it, or it can create its own governing infrastructure, using either U.S. personnel or scattered individuals who would be regarded simply as U.S. tools. Neither of these are acceptable choices, nor is withdrawal.

The United States very well might opt to install a Sunni proxy government quickly -- one that is strong enough to keep order but weak enough that it needs the United States to secure it against major uprisings or foreign meddling. However, the more recent experiences in nation building -- in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo -- suggest rather that Washington will try to forge a multi-party government representing all factions. One need only look at Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo to forecast the result of this.

This is the dilemma the United States faces. It is soluble, but not easily.<