With all the attention focused on prison abuses at Abu Ghraib and the brutal murder of an American civilian, it may be easy to overlook the necessity of shaping an Iraqi government, and quickly.

The Bush administration may have been a bit hasty in setting a June 30 deadline for handing over authority to Iraqis, but now that it is set, that date must be met. To miss it would be to increase misapprehensions in a country where trust and goodwill seem to be rare commodities. It would lead to further attacks on Americans and coalition forces.

But with that date a little more than a month away, many problems need to be resolved. Late last week, Iraqi leaders were disputing many of the proposals for the postwar government. A U.N. team is expected to begin negotiating this week with the Iraqi Governing Council, handpicked by the United States, over the structure of the government.

At issue is whether the interim government should be a mere caretaker of appointed officials who set the rules for the nationwide election of a permanent government in January, or whether the interim government itself should be more representative of the nation at-large. The Bush administration contends there isn't enough time to put together a national assembly before June 30, and it probably is right.

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Also at issue is the future role of coalition forces within Iraq. U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer made the startling statement last week that the United States would leave Iraq entirely if the new government asked it to do so, but the United States and Britain are, at the same time, trying to get U.N. approval to carry out military operations within Iraq after June 30 without Iraqi approval.

Frankly, it would be a disaster for U.S. forces to pull out quickly. Because of uncertainty and chaos, Iraq has become fertile ground for al-Qaida and other enemies of the West. The beheading last week of U.S. civilian Nicolas Berg ought to serve as chilling evidence of that. The CIA believes one of the men in the videotape of that murder was Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who runs his own terrorist network in Iraq and is believed to have close ties to Osama bin Laden.

Zarqawi, and others like him, are deadly determined to stamp out the buds of democracy before they can grow. Should coalition forces leave prematurely, they could succeed and establish a fundamentalist regime in Iraq far worse than the Taliban once was in Afghanistan. And then Iraq would be a worse threat to the West than it was under Saddam Hussein.

The investigations of abuses are important and must be carried out in the name of justice and national honor. But the most important matter at hand is preparing for June 30 and immediately thereafter.

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