The confusion in Iraq, it seems, at least partly mirrors confusion in Washington. As Eli Lake's stupefying account most clearly suggests, there is no unified policy on an interim government, just a rugby scrum of bureaucratic factions:

Ironically, the Salahuddin conference that produced the leadership panel Wolfowitz would like to empower was, at the time, considered a victory for the State Department, which used the opportunity to marginalize the INC, the one-time umbrella for the Iraqi opposition. In Salahuddin, the INC was only one of numerous opposition groups that it had once held under its wing, including SCIRI and both major Kurdish parties. Alongside Chalabi, delegates to the conference chose Allawi, an ex-Baathist who has received clandestine funding from the CIA since the early '90s; Abdul Aziz Hakim, brother of Mohammed Bakr Al Hakim, whose militia is trained by Iran's military; and the leaders of both Kurdish parties, Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani. The sixth member of the leadership committee was Adnan Pachachi, an octogenarian former Iraqi foreign minister living in the United Arab Emirates who has been courted by the Saudis and, more recently, by Zalmay Khalilzad, the president's special envoy to the Iraqi opposition. (Pachachi and Allawi have been unclear as to whether they are still a part of this group, making it essentially a group of four and leaving it Sunni-less for now.) The Pentagon plan calls for the group of four to help choose Iraqi internals and develop a power-sharing arrangement to lead an interim authority with input from Washington.