Bremer adjusts strategy in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq — L. Paul Bremer rises at 5 a.m. in his modest residence in a white air-conditioned trailer that overlooks the Tigris River — if you don't count the portable toilets that partly block the view.

Most days he jogs around the once-splendid gardens of Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, behind which his trailer is perched, and is at his desk inside the marbled halls an hour later wearing a suit and Army-issue combat boots.

When he moves out beyond the palace walls, now girded by an endless helix of razor wire, he has around-the-clock protection from a force of former Navy Seals and Army guards. Most Iraqis know very little about him except that he is whisked through their streets sandwiched between machine gunners in a convoy and that he appears on television with a fresh kerchief in his pocket and those size 10 1/2 desert boots, which he even wore to the World Economic Forum in Jordan last month. ("I thought he had forgotten to change," a Western colleague commented.)

In the dust of Iraq, the boots, Bremer says, are an attempt to spare his dress shoes. But they also signify that he is engaged in managerial combat.

For Bremer, the 61-year-old occupation administrator of Iraq, the daunting problems of the most complex and expensive nation-building tasks the United States has undertaken in a half-century have only intensified since President Bush appointed him on May 6.

The economy remains devastated and moribund. Electricity supplies to the capital are failing. Guerrilla attacks on U.S. troops are increasing. Saddam Hussein has returned as a disembodied voice on audiotape exhorting his followers to rebellion and sabotage.

Bremer's notion that he could run Iraq on the strength of decisive and firm management policies has given way, a number of Western and Iraqi officials say, to the realization that he desperately needs an Iraqi governing body to share responsibility — or blame — for the long-term task of

establishing postwar order and stability.

"There has been a process of coming down to earth," said Hoshyar Zebari, the affable policy aide to the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani.

When Bremer arrived in Baghdad on May 12, he inherited a landscape of collapsed government, burned-out ministries, looted universities and commercial centers and police and security forces that had fled or abandoned their posts.