POST-WAR PLAN: Conor O'Clery, North America Editor, reports on the bitter battle now raging behind the scenes
It all seemed so simple when the war started. "Shock and awe" would cause the Iraqi regime to fall like a pack of cards, allowing US troops to quickly seize Baghdad, and the US would then run the country for a period before handing over Iraq to a new democratic government.
But the US forces are now fighting a longer and more difficult war than forecast and the Bush administration is deeply split over what happens when the war is declared over, with the Defence Department battling the State Department in a grab for absolute power in post-war Iraq.
This struggle erupted into the open yesterday with the leaked news that the Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, had rejected a team of eight officials proposed by Mr Colin Powell's State Department to help run post-war Iraq. They included several ambassadors to Arab states.
Instead, the Pentagon is planning to give prominent roles in the post-war US administration in Baghdad to long-time supporters of regime change such as former CIA director Mr James Woolsey.
The Defence Department's plan for post-war Iraq, drawn up by Under-Secretary of Defence Douglas Feith and supported by Vice-President Dick Cheney, calls for the US military to control the country until an Iraqi government is installed under a new constitution.
The Pentagon had listed Mr Woolsey for the Iraqi Information Ministry, but the White House thought this might be considered "inappropriate" because of his CIA background and suggested that he be given a different ministry, according to the Washington Post.
But few observers in Washington doubt that it is Mr Rumsfeld who has the President's ear, and it is not thought insignificant that Mr Powell, often criticised for not travelling enough, is currently absent on a trip to Turkey while the internal struggle intensifies.
The US administration in Baghdad, to be known as the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, is to be placed under the command of retired army general Jay Garner, currently waiting out the war in Kuwait, who answers to the overall military commander, General Tommy Franks, who in turn reports to Mr Rumsfeld.
Mr Powell, backed by the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, has all along urged a speedy transfer of Iraq to UN control to gain international legitimacy and to draw other countries into the expensive reconstruction effort.
General Garner asked the State Department to submit names for the 23 ministries to be headed by Americans in Baghdad and staffed by Iraqi advisers. The eight officials nominated by Mr Powell were told to prepare for travel to the region at short notice.
But Mr Rumsfeld has stood them down as too low-profile, most probably on the recommendation of his deputy, Mr Paul Wolfowitz, who is in charge of overseeing the staffing composition.
As for the UN, the only role envisaged by the Pentagon for the world body is the distribution of humanitarian aid under US supervision. General Garner took on responsibility for aid distribution a month ago.
Mr Powell wrote to Mr Rumsfeld last week underlining the importance of civilians being put in charge of distributing aid to avoid the perception that the military was an occupying force. Any US disaster response teams, he said, should report to the State Department agency USAID and not the military.
Non-governmental organisations which have distributed aid in Iraq for years, along with the UN's World Food Programme and UNICEF, the programme for children, are insisting that they must not be co-opted as an arm of the American military and that they should decide where and how aid is distributed.
The UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, has argued that UN relief agencies must have operational independence.
Aid agencies fear that if the US military was to dispense aid the operation would be political and chaotic, as seen in Basra in recent days. There is also concern that humanitarian workers throughout the world would be put in jeopardy if aid agencies worked under the US military. Some 14 major aid agencies in the US have written to Mr Bush asking that he place all humanitarian work under UN control.
By the end of April, when pre-war food stockpiles are exhausted by Iraqi families, there will be a critical need to restore the food-for-oil programme, which supplied 450,000 tons of food every month.
Meanwhile, long-simmering tensions between Mr Rumsfeld and his generals have erupted over the war plan. Officers in the field, in anonymous briefings with embedded correspondents, are comparing him with Robert McNamara, the US Defence Secretary from 1961 to 1968, who failed to appreciate the realities of war in Vietnam.
One colonel in field told the New York Times: "He wanted to fight this war on the cheap, he got what he wanted." In the US media, a number of retired generals are acting as surrogates for disgruntled generals in commentaries on the war.
General Barry McCaffrey, who led the 24th Mechanised Infantry Division in the Gulf War but is now retired, wrote in yesterday's Wall Street Journal that the "rolling start" concept of the attack dictated by Mr Rumsfeld had resulted in US forces being "over-extended and at risk". He also said that the the forces on the ground were lacking sufficient divisions and artillery.
Since he became Defence Secretary over two years ago, Mr Rumsfeld has emphasised long-range precision weapons and mobility over what the army calls "boots on the ground". In the Gulf War, a ground force of 500,000 was assembled. This time he insisted that the the fighting force be much smaller. It amounts today to 180,000 troops out of US and British personnel totalling in the region of 300,000, fewer than 100,000 of them inside Iraq.
The calculation was that the land war could start at the same time as "shock and awe" from the air even though forces were still arriving. If the war turned out to be more difficult, then the flow of new troops could be fed in and subsequently stopped when no longer necessary.
The policy has led to sharp differences between Mr Rumsfeld and the army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, especially after the Defence Secretary's advisers reportedly suggested some time ago cutting two of the army's 10 divisions to pay for new high-tech weapons.
In a Congressional hearing before the war, General Shinseki testified that "several hundred thousand" troops would be needed, earning him a public rebuke from Mr Wolfowitz that this was "wildly off the mark". No one is saying that now.