Now, just a week before the second anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Bush administration appears to have decided that Washington really cannot run Iraq, let alone the entire Middle East, by itself and must rely on others--even the much-despised United Nations--to help out.

Whether the UN will agree to do so--and on what conditions--remains to be determined, but, for the first time in two years, it appears that the administration's more multilaterally inclined, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, may actually be moving into the driver's seat. While the battle for control is far from over, the signs of what is being euphemistically called a "policy adjustment'' have already emerged.

Not only has Powell been given the authority to launch serious negotiations over a new UN Security Council resolution that will almost certainly reduce Washington's control over the political process and reconstruction in Iraq, but even the ultra-unilateralist Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith--whose office was responsible for post-war planning in Iraq--insisted publicly that he has long favored going to the UN for help.

Feith's scarcely credible protests underline the degree to which the hawks, particularly his two superiors, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, have been placed on the defensive. Hailed as strategic geniuses as recently as July, their repeated assurances that everything was going according to plan despite steadily mounting U.S. casualties, a series of disastrous bombings, and skyrocketing estimates of the financial costs of occupation--the latest estimates call for as much as $80 billion next year, or four times the State Department's annual administrative and foreign aid budget--have become the stuff of late-night comedy routines and growing anger in key institutional sectors, particularly the military and Republicans in Congress.

Thus, carefully orchestrated clarion calls by Wolfowitz and his allies in the media to stay the course in Iraq in order to defeat international terrorism once and for all, published at the beginning of the week in the neoconservative Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard, were quickly drowned out by Republican lawmakers returning from the August recess demanding that the administration quickly devise an "exit strategy'' for Iraq and, explicitly evoking the Vietnam War, show them a "light at the end of the tunnel."

"Wolfowitz frankly has very little credibility up here," said one congressional staffer who recalled that the Pentagon's number two man had led the campaign to persuade Congress that Iraq had vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and close ties to al Qaeda before the war. He has since admitted that the intelligence on both questions was "murky." Wolfowitz, along with Vice President Dick Cheney, also argued that U.S. troops would be greeted as "liberators" by the Iraqi operation, rather than occupiers. "For him, of all people, to be the point man for arguing that Iraq is now the decisive battlefield in the war on terrorism simply defies common sense," the aide added, noting that Wolfowitz also supervised Feith's post-war planning, which is now seen as an appalling failure.

But while Republican lawmakers, fresh from public meetings with their constituents back home and only one year away from the 2004 elections, expressed growing impatience with the costs in U.S. lives and money of an open-ended occupation, senior military officers, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appear to have decided that their civilian bosses represent a major threat to their institution