Today's automotive paint is durable and resistant to stains and has a high gloss. Vehicles of today primarily utilize a two stage paint process know as base coat, clear coat. There are a number of three stage colors that have become popular. The best example is the pearl white that General Motors uses on the Cadillac. When viewed from different angles the freshwater pearl pendant paint color appears to change. This is due to the mid coat, which is applied after the base coat and before the clear coat. The mid coat contains pearlescent powders that cover a broad color spectrum. If you look closely, you can see the small flakes of purple, reds, blues and other colors that give the pearl look to the finish. This type of refinishing is also known as" Tri Coat" with some paint manufactures.

This three stage process drove painters crazy when attempting to match colors. Typically, when a fender replacement was needed, blending the color back into the door to achieve a proper color match was required. In preparation for the blending operation all items are removed from the door such as handles, glass, moldings and trim. The base coat or first stage was applied to the fender and partially into the door. The second stage is the application of wish pearl jewelry the clear coat, which is applied in two coats over the fender and complete door.With the addition of another spraying process after the base or first stage, the blending into the door did not produce an acceptable color match. The industry had to come up with a solution to this problem. The answer required a procedure known as zone refinishing.

The same type of damage that previously required blending into the door now includes the preparation and refinishing of additional undamaged panels along the same side as the repairs. Depending on the color and location, it may be necessary to paint the entire side of a vehicle in order to achieve a proper color match. There are also custom colors that appear to change drastically when viewed from different angles. One example is changing from a pearl beads rust color to a deep purple and the car actually appears to undergo a change of color as it moves towards or away from you. This is due to the addition of special pearls and xirallic effects.

Xirallic effects are aluminum oxide platelets which are then coated with metal oxides. These platelets are manufactured synthetically using a new crystallization process. The cost of this type of additive is expensive compared to typical pearl type applications. The addition of the three stage refinishing process takes considerably more time to complete. In conclusion the three stage refinishing process is here to stay and adds pleasant visual affect to akoya pearl necklace the cars of today.

One December 7, 1941, the Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor and took everyone by surprise. However, the incident precipitated the entry of the freswhater pearl necklace United States of America into World War II.

The events that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor actually began a decade earlier. In 1931, Japan occupied Manchuria and claimed it as an independent state which was run by the Japanese army through a puppet government. Until this happened, Manchuria was a freshwater pearl pendant part of China. Then, Japan started expanding its empire and embarked in 1937 to freshwater pearl sets conquer China. The United States had economical and political interests in China and East Asia, so it started strengthening the military power in Pacific and sending aid to China to combat the Japanese occupation.

In the meantime, in September 1940, Hitler created the Tripartite Pact wherein there was a mutual military assistance agreement between Japan, Germany and Italy. By July 1941, peace negotiations were failing and the United States and Great Britain reacted by placing embargo on oil and other raw material to Japan. This came as a shock to Japan as 80 percent of its oil was supplied by America and the Japanese government viewed the oil embargo as threat to silver pearl sets the survival of the country. In return, Japan went on to seize Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), which was rich in oil, within a year, practically all of Indochina was occupied by Japan.

By this time, it was a forgone conclusion that America would have to go to war with Japan. War was inevitable. Franklin D Roosevelt had the foresight of transferring the United States Pacific Fleet to Pearl Harbor 18 months before. The commander of Japanese fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, knew that the Pacific Fleet posed a major threat to Japan so he engineered a surprise attack to immobilize the US Navy before a turquoise jewelry war between Japan and the US took place.

Admiral Yamamoto devised an attack force that consisted of 6 aircraft carriers with over 420 planes, a group of fast battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and tankers to fuel ships. A separate group of scout submarines were sent in advance to Hawaii to sink any American warships that escaped.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was indeed ingenious with precise planning and execution of aerial warfare and surprise. The December 7, 1941 attack killed 2,400 US military personnel and 68 civilians. Over 1,100 were wounded. The US forces lost 188 aircrafts and 159 were damaged. In the shell jewelry Pacific Fleet, 21 warships were either damaged or sunk.

On December 8, 1941, the United States of America officially entered into World War II

BlackBerry Phones require no introduction. However, for those who are new and are inquisitive in knowing about Blackberry here are few quick facts about them. Blackberry phone has been developed by Rim and is known for providing mobile phones all over the wholesale pearl jewelry world with competent solutions. People have appreciated their latest cell phones technology like BlackBerry pearl and BlackBerry 8800 series for their strong influence because of the style, sleek, compact and integrated mobile solutions. Beside this smartphones have enabled people to stay connected in business and personal life. They have made the lives easier and better. Some of the features of the latest Blackberry cell phones are Digital Camera, GPS navigation with the help of Blackberry mapping, Media Players, and much more. These features vary from one model to another.

To help you understand better about Blackberry phones better lets discuss one of freshwater pearl necklace their make like RIM Blackberry 9500 storm. This smartphone has touch screen facility, 480x320 pixel touch screen display, auto screen rotation, 1 GB of internal storage, 128 MB expandable RAM, etc.

Beside these other latest Blackberry phones are Blackberry 9000, Blackberry pearl flip 8220, Blackberry pearl 8120, Blackberry 8820, and Blackberry curve 8320.

Blackberry pearl flip 8220 is smart, stylish and sleek. It helps you in being socially connected and provide you with pocket size entertainment zone.

Black berry curve 8320 has personal organizer, vibration alerts, integrated hands free speaker, standard battery for akoya pearl bracelet LI-Ion 1100mAh, voice dial, media player, 2 mega pixel camera with high image resolution and flash, Blackberry maps, trackball navigation, etc.

BlackBerry 8820 smartphone is smart phone with power pack features. They have premium finish and are on stop destination for people who like to coral jewelry communicate.

The Russian hamster is a very tiny creature that is known by a few other big names, such as Siberian Hamster, the Russian winter white or the striped hairy-footed hamster. This dwarf hamster full grown weighs in at 1 to 2 ounces and tends to multi-strand necklaces be about 4 inches in length generally good natured and sociable.

Their basic colors are dark gray, lilac blue or purple gray with a predominately white head. One reason this hamster is also called the Russian winter white is because their coats prominently turn white in response to reduced levels of sunlight. In the wild, where breeding of color is natural, they are commonly dark gray, with a wholesale coral jewelry black dorsal strip, prominent white belly and striking black eyes.

Hamster "jewels" colors are obtained when breeding for coat colors and texture of their hair. Sapphire Siberian dwarf hamsters are blue-gray or purple-gray, once again with a dark dorsal strip on it's back, The belly color is ivory with striking black eyes.

The other "jewels" color is Pearl. Their whole coat is pearl - almost all pearl white in color, with black or purple hairs scattered randomly about their coat. On the head and their spine is a bit of color and where there is black hairs on the freshwater pearl strands back one can notice the bit's and pieces of the dorsal stripe and is called the Siberian Pearl.

If your interested in showing off your pet hamsters colors, try contacting your local pet store to find out about local breeders and hamster clubs that facilitate Hamster shows. At most pet shows, the hamster is judged in a class of members of it's own type and sex. Then the categories are split from there into age and coat color. Each hamster is given points for how closely they match the ideal standard, with the condition of it's fur, ears and eyes are all part of the judging. Perhaps you might need to make some room at home for your turn to freshwater pearl earrings bring home the trophy!

With the 2008 Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries less than a year away, the professional (and the amateur) handicapper can lay aside such mundane considerations as which presidential aspirant has the best plan for Iraq or which one is inflatable most apt to produce full employment. What seems to be mattering most is a different sort of standard, the "authenticity" standard, the winner being the most appealingly "authentic" -- as in real, not fake or false -- person in the race. The quotation marks are advisable because authenticity is a deceptively difficult concept to define, especially in the political arena. Authenticity may be about manipulated perceptions of "the real McCoy" as much as it is about the actual existence of such a figure. No matter. For voters, authenticity has become a Holy Grail. "We're in the era of authenticity," political consultant Mary Matalin has proclaimed.

A rundown of the top candidates demonstrates her point. John McCain, a war hero and former prisoner of war who is known both for his "straight talk" and for a string of best-sellers that trade on that character trait, is the personification of the post-Bill Clinton breed of authenticity politician. Come this summer, the bookstores will be featuring McCain's latest effort, "Hard Call," about path-breaking decisions, in areas such as sports and business, that took guts and principle to make. Such books "are narratives about the values he has or would like to have," Mark Salter, McCain's co-author (and chief of staff) said in an interview. Salter conceded that McCain's unyielding support of the Iraq war is so unpopular that his reputation for authenticity may be his only ticket to the White House. McCain's top rival for the Republican nomination is Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City. Giuliani became a national hero for his calm performance under pressure on 9/11 and in the days after, and he oozes authenticity from his outer-borough (Brooklyn-born) pores. The Giuliani mantra is "Be Your Own Man," which is a chapter title from his 2002, self-laudatory tome, "Leadership." "Rudy tends to be authentically sincere," Fred Siegel, a sympathetic biographer, told me, and Americans seem to agree: The mercurial Rudy, whom Siegel's father once described as "a beloved son of inflatable bouncer a ," is viewed favorably by some 70 percent of Americans.

On the Democratic side, authenticity spiked with a few ounces of charisma is a formula that may work for the superstar-from-nowhere, Barack Obama, the senator from Illinois who arrived in Washington in 2005. He has an understandably meager list of accomplishments, given his short life in politics, but he is the overnight darling of the media and those members of the public in search of an "authentic, fresh voice," the kind of voice that Robert F. Kennedy brought to politics in the 1960s, veteran Newsweek writer Evan Thomas, the author of a biography on RFK, noted recently on television's Inside Washington. Obama's first book, the memoir "Dreams From My Father," is a work of soul-baring, in which the reader is invited to be an intimate observer of the author's search for his identity as the child of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya. It is a supremely authentic American tale, almost an archetype for the 21st-century version of our Tiger Woods, melting pot society.

As for the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the common criticism that she is somehow inauthentic, a plastic figure, can be countered by a different reading of the evidence. It is certainly true that she is not a born communicator, like her husband, and that she has devoted enormous care and attention to the public packaging of her persona, but this does not amount to proof of core phoniness. The protean Bill Clinton, who can BS with the best of them, might plausibly be viewed in that way. But Hillary Rodham, as she was known in the 1960s, is an authentic child of that era, as her best-selling memoir, "Living History," shows. She authentically embodies the battles that many intelligent and ambitious women of her generation fought to establish their own careers and an identity separate from their expected roles as spouse and mom. The message discipline that she exerts can be seen as a way to use the tools of modern politics to get herself -- or at least the best part of herself -- across to the public. Ronald Reagan arguably used his acting skills for the same purpose. "I don't think she is phony at all -- I think she is authentic," Matalin, a Republican, said in an interview, adding, "I like ambitious women."

Authenticity can certainly be a trap and is perhaps a distraction: For voters, there is no particular reason to believe that an "authentic" person is going to be a good president or even, for that matter, a good person. The world is full of authentic crooks, loons, and megalomaniacs. The cowboy-boot-wearing, tobacco-chewing, football-tossing George Allen, often said to be natural in his bearing, once looked like a terrific authenticity play. But that was before he spoiled his 2006 Senate re-election bid, and his 2008 presidential hopes, by using the odd and possibly racist term "macaca" to refer to a young campaign worker for his opponent, Jim Webb. Virginia voters turned on him as an authentic jerk.

And the idea, as today's speech coaches believe, that authenticity can be acquired like any other skill (although at a cost of $10,000 to $15,000 a day for a top-rank teacher) is somewhat disconcerting, challenging what we think we know about our ability to spot that three-dollar bill. "Being authentic is better than play-acting authenticity," Ruth Sherman, who works out of Greenwich, Conn., as a communications consultant for clients in business, politics, and the entertainment industry, conceded in an e-mail exchange. But she added: "The truth is that it is difficult, if not impossible, for most voters to tell the difference."

Trap or not, the authenticity craving is already exerting a powerful pull on the 2008 presidential sweepstakes. And it is not, in fact, a new trend but a fashion that waxes and wanes. The intriguing question is, why it is waxing in this electoral cycle? Some historical perspective is useful, because a search for authenticity is often a reaction to anxieties and changes in the wider culture. The pursuit of the authentic leader may be an inescapable byproduct of America's dynamism as a society and its determination to reinvent itself every few decades or so. In the political arena in particular, this search might be voters' blunt way of responding to the endemic phoniness and artifice that sometimes seem to be the very definition of what it means to be a politician. The inflatable castles authentic politician, whether he be a John McCain or a Barack Obama, is almost always going to be something of an anti-politician. That is true today -- and it was true a couple of centuries ago.

The Andrew Jackson Model
They called him Old Hickory, and he was a remarkable embodiment of all that a new type of American, a new kind of authentic American, could be. Andrew Jackson was a frontiersman from the Carolinas who fought the Indians and the British, and when he entered the White House as president in 1828 -- after having lost the "stolen election" of 1824 -- he let the people, clad in their muddy boots, have the run of the joint. His two terms in office were defined by his battles against the Eastern establishment, which he viewed as insular, aristocratic, and effete. His predecessor, John Quincy Adams, a representative of that establishment, called him "a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar." Jackson was America's first great populist figure, and he derived his authenticity from that image. Although his politics are conventionally viewed as progressive, his rise to power can be seen as reactionary, in the sense that voters were jettisoning a tired and perhaps unrepresentative old model for a new one. "Authentic" figures in politics are often of this stamp.

George Washington, the "father of his country," no doubt deserves a prominent entry in any account of authenticity's role in national politics. But it is an entry of a particular kind. Washington, a plantation-owning Virginian, was in effect anointed president; for this reason, he is not the man-of-the-people model of authenticity established by Andrew Jackson and pursued by political aspirants to this day. Instead, Washington mastered the art of disciplining himself to project the exact image that he wanted to show to his peers, his troops, his countrymen, and foreign leaders. He succeeded, in other words, at the very task that Hillary Clinton is trying hard to master.

Consider how Washington is written up by John McCain. "Character Is Destiny," a 2005 book by McCain and his aide Salter, contains a chapter about Washington, under the heading of "Self-Control." The authors write: "He was intent on becoming a man of unquestioned dignity and he labored always to achieve the manners, appearance, and temperament that were its physical expressions.... He taught himself to dance with exquisite skill. His clothes were fine and neat but never flamboyant. He presented, as an admirer later observed, such an aura of command that 'there is not a king in Europe that would not look like a valet' " by Washington's side.

The Washington example -- the example of a man who came across as authentic in part because he diligently rehearsed the role -- is not one that mars his character, but it is the first suggestion of the complexities that can arise when the public demands authenticity. The tip-off, for those who are determined to find the real McCoy and not the scripted one, might be the character trait of irrepressibility. George Washington does not appear to have been an irrepressible type; Theodore Roosevelt, to jump ahead to the "Rough Rider" who gobbled down just about every dish that life had to offer, and then asked for second helpings, was very much that sort. TR simply couldn't help being himself and was loved for this trait even by people who had no particular appetite for his imperial big-stick politics. Yes, John McCain comes to mind. (For wordsmiths, the origins of "the real McCoy" are obscure; one of several extant theories traces the phrase to a Prohibition-era bootlegger named William S. McCoy, who was known for delivering an undiluted product.)

Reaction and Backlash
The Jackson model notwithstanding, American politics has not always been consumed by a search for authenticity. Consider the election, four times over, of Franklin Delano Roosevelt starting in 1932 amid the terrible trauma of the Great Depression. Even his admirers often viewed FDR as a rather charming charlatan who could have each of 10 people leave a meeting believing that the boss was absolutely on his side. In his tactics, Roosevelt was a master of bluff and deceit; he could tell a convincing lie. A disoriented and fearful America, at that moment of immense peril in the 1930s, might have elected an "authentic" dictator, as another country was doing in Europe, but instead chose a wily patrician with a pragmatic genius for tailoring the right solutions to the moment. In that instance, a possible authenticity trap was avoided.

In the post-World War II era, the pursuit of authenticity became especially intense in the 1960s. And what a trip it was. The fuel was supplied by the 1950s and everything ociated with that Father Knows Best era, which a new generation marching to the anthems of Bob Dylan and searching for "experience" deemed counterfeit. The '60s can be mocked for vagueness, but there can be no questioning the sincerity or idealism of that decade's quest for the real and the meaningful. Hillary Rodham, of the Wellesley  of 1969, was painfully, perhaps somewhat guiltily, aware of the privilege and isolation of her upbringing in Park Ridge, a white middle- suburb of Chicago. Her mates harbored similar sentiments. "Most of us had come from sheltered backgrounds, and the personal and public events we encountered caused us to question the authenticity, even the reality, of our precollege lives," she wrote, decades later, in "Living History."

In Rodham's case, her questioning led to direct action. At first she was an admirer of community organizer Saul Alinsky, an authentic act-up type of the irrepressible sort, who confronted corporations with colorful, attention-getting tactics. But then she decided, against Alinsky's advice, that change could best be pursued within the system. For a time, or perhaps for just a moment, it looked as though the 1960s authenticity movement could transform the nature of politics. As Evan Thomas has noted, Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of a slain president, a youthful figure who seemed both frail and courageous and who, on the matter of Vietnam, seem determined to speak truth to power, was the person, outside the arena of radical politics, who laid claim to the authenticity mantle. But then, of course, RFK was inated in 1968 and the '60s gave way to the '70s, which garnered a reputation, perhaps unfairly, for plasticity in everything from polyester pants to the disco beat. Goodbye, Jimi Hendrix; hello, Bee Gees.

Richard Nixon, the ascendant political figure in the wake of RFK's murder and LBJ's political demise, was certainly not any counter-establishmentarian's brand of authentic politician. Nor was he comfortable in his own skin, as the unrehearsed "authenticity" figure generally is. This is the man, remember, who was famously photographed walking the Pacific Ocean shores of San Clemente in dark dress trousers and what appear to be wingtip shoes. Nevertheless,  Nixon is not easily branded a phony. Born in a tiny farmhouse, built by his hard-luck father, in Yorba Linda, Calif., Nixon as a political property was about many things. But one of them was his representation of authentic petit bourgeois concerns, the concerns that small shopkeepers, say, have about law and order. In this sense, Nixon might be seen as anticipating the rise of Rudolph W. Giuliani, who grew up in a working- neighborhood of Brooklyn, became a Mob-busting U.S. attorney, and then, as the mayor of New York City in the 1990s, restored a social order that '60s-style permissive policies had failed to uphold. It's another example of the authenticity figure being all about reaction, all about backlash. Or to put it another way, an authenticity figure can surf to power on a wave of nostalgia.

Blame It on Bill
The roots of today's authenticity yearning can be found in the time of Bill Clinton. The objection to Clinton, in many minds, went quite a bit further than his talents at tossing the bull. There is your standard smooth-talking salesman type who (authentically) likes to shake every hand in the room, and then there is the sort of fellow who says, "I didn't inhale," when confronted with a question about a youthful partaking of the demon marijuana weed. "I didn't inhale" is irreducibly phony. If he truly didn't inhale, he played false to his pot-smoking buddies. If he did, he lied to project a false image to Ward and June Cleaver, Mr. and Mrs. America, as a fine, upstanding boy of his time. Clinton's incessant search for the dodge, whether on the question of drug use or service in Vietnam, appeared to be an indication of his lack of good character.

Enter John McCain and the "Straight Talk Express," which was the name that his campaign staff gave to the bus on which the senator held a rolling, 18-hour-a-day press conference as he drove around the country trying to persuade voters to put him in the White House in 2001. Eight years into the era of Bill Clinton, the anti-Bill Clinton epoch had already begun. And it had legs: McCain won the New Hampshire primary and fell short in South Carolina only after a dirty campaign in which his opponents turned his bio against him, suggesting that his POW experience had somehow made him unstable.

The thing about McCain was that there was simply no pose, a biographer, Robert Timberg, noted in an interview. A graduate, like McCain, of the U.S. Naval Academy and a Marine lieutenant who served in Vietnam, Timberg included a sympathetic portrait of McCain in the 1995 book "The Nightingale's Song," and he expanded on that treatment in "John McCain: An American Odyssey." The McCain whom journalists became acquainted with on the Straight Talk Express was the very same fellow whom Timberg began hanging out with, for his book, in the late 1980s when McCain was weathering the so-called Keating Five scandal connected to abuses in the savings-and-loan industry. "He was gloomy, he was grim," Timberg recalled. "You always knew you were dealing with a human being. When he was upset, he showed it."

McCain, in short, met the irrepressibility test of true authenticity. It can be argued that his authenticity revealed good or at least pertinent things about his possibilities as a president. "People who are true to their instincts," Salter, his chief of staff, told me, "are more inclined to go with those instincts, to be bolder."

McCain failed to beat George W. Bush for the Republican nomination; but in the general election, Democrat Al Gore, the candidate who was generally seen as more synthetic and less comfortable in his skin than was Bush in his, failed to claim a prize that, in a favorable economic climate, looked well within his grasp.

The 9/11 attacks both boosted and recast the public's demand for authenticity from its leaders. Matalin, the political consultant, recalls noting this trend in the 2002 midterms, the first elections held after the attacks, in her efforts to boost prospects for GOP congressional candidates. Voters were so alarmed about a lethal threat that they poorly understood, she said, they simply shut their ears to any candidate engaging in the usual platitudinous rituals of politics. In the immediate post-Clinton era, authenticity was about moral character, about not being the sort of person who would embarr the nation with a tawdry scandal. After 9/11, authenticity was more about the sort of person with the nerves and steel to steer the ship of state at a time of grave danger. Elected in 2000 on a platform of restoring "honor and dignity" to the White House, Bush was re-elected in 2004 with a vow to stay fast and true in his pursuit of America's enemies.

These days, Bush's job-approval ratings hover in the low 30s. The source of the public's disappointment, however, is not that he is inauthentic but that he is authentically stubborn. Hindsight views of Clinton's presidency, meanwhile, have improved. Yet, even though a phony arguably governed better than a nonphony, the public, circa 2007, is ever more demanding of authenticity. It is a difficult circle to square. Perhaps the explanation is that voters, in continuing to place a premium on authenticity, rationalize by telling themselves that Bush was simply the wrong sort of authentic person. Next time they can do better.

Handicapping the Authenticity Stakes
The 2008 presidential election will not, of course, be only about authenticity. With the Katrina and Iraq debacles in the public's mind, the election will also be about the proven (or not) competence and experience of the candidates, their visions, and their policy proposals on the big issues. But the authenticity question looms sufficiently large for it to be a useful way to handicap the field as the horses prance and snort and start to paw the starting line.

Certainly McCain, with his proven credentials, has to be considered first out of the gate. "I think McCain has the monopoly on authenticity. No one has done it better," Timberg, his biographer, said. Of course, Timberg is partial to his horse, so his ertion is not the end of the discussion. McCain's own aide, Salter, considers Giuliani to be a credible bearer of the authenticity mantle. "I think he has a sort of irrepressible personality that adds to his appeal," Salter said. Moreover, the tactics that today's McCain is adopting, to court the Christian Right and to hire political consultants known for their hardball negative ads, could undermine his authenticity appeal by making him look like a typical pol, and no more the anti-pol.

Giuliani, if he can persuade enough Republican primary voters to look past his support of abortion rights, could rival McCain's claim to authenticity. As he showed in becoming a Republican mayor of a very blue New York City, a reputation for authenticity can help a candidate transcend conventional ideological barriers. Giuliani was widely viewed as sincere even by those who felt his crackdown on crime went too far, noted Siegel, author of the 2005 biography "The Prince of the City" and an adviser to the mayor in the early 1990s. "People who hated Rudy's guts felt that on crime, he wasn't posturing," Siegel explained. A dream GOP authenticity ticket might pair McCain and Giuliani. "McCain is the only person I can imagine Giuliani running as vice president for," Siegel told me.

That would rule out, then, a pairing with Mitt Romney. The former achusetts governor has embarked on a long "journey to the Right," as a recent National Journal cover story described his evolution from the man who tried (without success) to win a U.S. Senate seat in the Bay State in the mid-1990s by portraying himself as "a better advocate" for gays than the incumbent, Edward Kennedy, would be, to today's fellow, the man who is a featured speaker at gatherings of homophobic anti-gay-rights activists. Romney's task -- to win over social-conservative activists and primary voters in his path to the Republican nomination -- is to demonstrate that the new Romney is the authentic Romney. It's possibly true. It is also possible, as a matter of logic, that the old Romney was the authentic one, and possible, too, that the old and the new Romneys are both phony ideological wrappings for the middling moderate within.

Obama's Two Hurdles
On the Democratic side, the purest play in the authenticity stakes would seem to be Barack Obama. "Oh, yeah, he makes it look easy," Ruth Sherman, the speech coach, said about Obama's television appearances. And yet, he faces two quite different types of authenticity obstacles. One relates to his racial identity. In the 1960s, a decade whose divisions Obama often says America needs to rise above, a subsection of the authenticity movement was the "Black Power" struggle. This movement, at least in part, was about a rejection of artificial and low-status identities that its leaders felt had been imposed upon African-Americans by the dominant white establishment. Black Power leaders, some quite militant in their politics, encouraged black Americans to look deeper for their roots in Africa and African culture. Obama, who was born in 1961, was only 7 when Tommie Smith and John Carlos memorably bowed their heads and raised their fists, clad in black gloves, while accepting their medals at the Olympic Games in Mexico in 1968. Nevertheless, that movement left a powerful legacy, and Obama has been subjected, within the black community, to questions about whether his identity meets not really a skin-color test but a cultural test of blackness.

"Obama isn't black," Debra J. erson, an African-American writer and the author of the 2004 book The End of Blackness, wrote recently in Salon. The reason, she explained, even as she made it clear that his candidacy would help open the door to the highest offices for all "candidates of color," is that " 'black,' in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves." Under her terms, Obama belongs in the nonblack category of "an American of African immigrant extraction." Obama, who spent years as a community organizer in poor, black, crime-ridden sections of Chicago and who made a roots pilgrimage to Kenya to meet his father's extended family, is unlikely to have much patience with this parsing. After all, he has complained in his writings about always playing "by the white man's rules" and has acknowledged how a "coil of rage" grew inside of him as a result.

Despite all of that, the perception of "not black enough" seems to be out there. Conceivably, the view could help him win the votes of some white folks -- those voters who may feel trepidations about pulling the lever for a "black" presidential candidate. But in certain early Democratic primaries, such as Alabama, Arkansas, and South Carolina, the black vote will be very important. Particularly in South Carolina, where many whites have already fled to the Republican Party, the black vote could approach 50 percent of the Democratic electorate. Hillary Clinton, who like her husband tends to be viewed positively by the black community, looms as a formidable competitor for those votes.

Obama's second authenticity hurdle can be seen in the way he seems to be changing the presentation of himself. Dreams From My Father, published in 1995, before he was a hotshot, was not a best-seller at first, but it did seem to draw from a deep well of honesty. Part of its appeal, as a matter of authenticity, was the author's willingness to confess to the confusion he felt about his place in American life. And the book contained confessional details of a sort that a typical politician would not reveal -- for example, his admission to using "maybe a little blow when you could afford it" during his last two years as a high school student in Hawaii.

His second book, "The Audacity of Hope," published in 2006 to best-selling acclaim, has a very different feel -- a less authentic one, it might be said. The book closes with a description of his occasional nighttime runs along the National Mall, which typically end with a jog up the Lincoln Memorial's steps. "At night, the great shrine is lit but often empty. Standing between marble columns, I read the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural," he writes, adding that, as he looks out over the Reflecting Pool, he imagines the crowd that was stilled by Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in the summer of 1963. "And in that place, I think about America and those who built it," Obama writes.

There is no reason not to believe him, but it comes across as a historically updated re-enactment of the scene in the Frank Capra film "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," in which the heroic Jimmy Stewart character visits the Lincoln Memorial in search of similar inspiration. The public likes to anoint its own heroes, or at least have the illusion of doing so, which is why Obama's authenticity star could lose luster if he comes to be seen as the constructor of his own Lincolnesque legend. In "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," Stewart's Jefferson Smith really was a wide-eyed character, a babe in the woods of politics. Obama entered the Senate seasoned by his experience as an elected member of a body, the Illinois Legislature, known for conducting its politics, as Obama himself once wrote, "as a full-contact sport" with "the occasional blindside hit." "Mr. Smith" in Washington he is not.

Edwards's Lifestyle Disparity
John Edwards, too, could find himself impaled on the authenticity stake. Picking up where he left off as John Kerry's running mate in 2004, Edwards is positioning himself for the nomination with a sell based on his life story as the son of a millworker who understands in his bones the concerns of working- America -- an America not of the rich and privileged. His problem on this score is that he is a wealthy former trial lawyer who appears to be living the lifestyle of a wealthy former trial lawyer. Sensing a bio-hypocrisy issue, the news media are all over his "new, palatial estate" outside of Chapel Hill, N.C. -- a 29,000-square-foot house and a separate recreation area that includes a swimming pool and a squash court.

Squash, a sport born at elite British boarding schools, is not exactly Joe Six-Pack's favorite. It's not clear whether the Edwards court is built for American-style play, with a hard green ball, or for the international-style game, which is increasingly popular in the States and is played with a soft ball. The ribbing about his plush new quarters, in any case, has begun. In an item in The Kansas City Star subheaded "The other America," the newspaper quoted comedian Jay Leno as saying, "All the presidential candidates were very busy this weekend. John Edwards traveled over 500 miles, and that was just from his front door to his swimming pool."

As for Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, she may never convince certain Republicans -- or certain males, be they Republican, independent, or Democratic -- that she is the kind of authentic person for whom they can vote. Even if she did stop using her maiden name to help her downcast husband win back his job as governor of the set-in-its-ways state of Arkansas in the 1980s, she makes no apologies for being the post-'50s sort of woman who was not satisfied to stay home and bake cookies; the work-the-levers sort of woman who became the first female partner in her Little Rock law firm; the opportunistic sort of woman who took to ensuring her family's financial security by venturing into the market for cattle futures and making a tidy bundle; and the pugnacious sort of woman who says, as she recently did, "When you're attacked, you have to inflatable water games deck your opponents." (Let the slugging begin?)

But perhaps it won't much hurt her that "Hillary" is authentically that sort of woman -- and a whole lot more. A dream Democratic authenticity ticket might pair Hillary Clinton, with her "modern-woman" appeal to the female portion of the electorate, and George Allen-slayer Jim Webb, with his war-hero, kick-, "real-man" appeal to the male segment. The freshman senator from Virginia is authentically brave, authentically outspoken, and, depending on your take on inflatable tent his conversational dustup with Bush on the Iraq war, authentically rude. But at least he is authentic.

President Bush's surge strategy for the Iraq war rests on the premise that all of the many participants in the conflagration -- the U.S. and Iraqi militaries, the U.S. diplomatic and aid bureaucracy, the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki,, even the U.S. Congress and certain Iraqi sectarian factions -- can pass several crucial tests. If any one of wholesale turquoise jewelry these players fails, the whole enterprise becomes riskier. If more than one falls short, the odds of success could become insurmountable. And even if all pass their exams with flying colors, the surge may still fail.

In interviews with current and former senior government officials, active and retired military leaders, and think-tank analysts of all stripes, the level of confidence in Bush's plan is, to be generous, low.

The strategy depends, first, on the readiness and relative good faith of Iraqi security forces and political leaders, especially Maliki and his government. That reliance is perhaps the Bush administration's greatest embrace of hope over experience. So many times already, the Iraqi government, and the Iraqi military and police forces, have been found wanting. After two failed campaigns to secure Baghdad, will the United States receive effective Iraqi military support this time to turquoise jewelry help clear neighborhoods? Will Iraqi police be able to provide a useful presence to hold the ground? This time, this time, senior Bush officials say, the early signs are that Maliki and the Iraqi troops may be passing the test.

Although the prime minister has often responded testily in public to increased U.S. pressure to act against the Shiite militias tied to renegade cleric Moktada al-Sadr, U.S. sources in Iraq note recent progress, some of it behind the scenes. They say that Maliki sent delegations to the holy city of Najaf last month to speak to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a relative moderate and the senior Shiite religious figure in Iraq. The Maliki delegation also visited Sadr himself.

U.S. officials, meanwhile, reached out to Iraq's Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, a longtime U.S. ally, and to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the largest Shiite party in Iraq. The officials strongly encouraged the pair to back Maliki's hand in any showdown with Sadr, whose party has 32 members of parliament in the prime minister's ruling majority. The purpose of those talks, say administration sources, was to set the conditions for the crackdown on rogue elements of Sadr's Mahdi army that are responsible for some of the worst death-squad activity. In recent weeks, the Iraqi government has arrested several top Sadr lieutenants and detained more than 600 members of the Mahdi army. Sadr, normally a firebrand orator, responded in unusually quiet fashion, agreeing to end a boycott of the parliament and raising no objections to the arrests.

But even if the Shiites cooperate, the surge strategy gambles that 21,500 additional U.S. soldiers and marines are enough to control the violence in Baghdad -- a city of 6 million people -- and in the vast Sunni extremist stronghold of Anbar province. In addition, Bush is wagering that the surge won't break the back of a strained U.S. military that is reaching an equipment and readiness crisis, and that military leaders can add and extend tours for troops who are already on their third and fourth rotations in the region -- without reducing re-enlistments or dampening recruiting. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, recall, wants to expand recruiting over the next five years to increase the size of the armed forces by 92,000 troops.

By decisively redirecting the mission in Iraq from training and support back to providing security, U.S. forces also take the risk of simultaneously confronting Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias. Such clashes could unite sworn enemies in their common hatred of the American "occupiers," and could spike the U.S. death toll to a degree that may be unsustainable at home.

"I believe stopping or significantly affecting the civil war in Iraq is probably beyond our capacity at this point. With the surge, we're going to face a terrible dilemma," said Richard Haass, the former director of policy planning at the State Department in George W. Bush's first term, testifying recently before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. If U.S. forces focus on defeating the Sunni insurgency, he said, they'll play into the hands of Shiite Iran and possibly alienate Sunni allies in the Middle East. "Or we end up going after the Shiite militias, which is taking on a much larger mission. And we would not have the Iraqi government as a partner anymore," said Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. "My principal problem with the surge is that it reinforces the interaction between American forces and the Iraqi civil war. I am increasingly persuaded that is where we don't want to be."

Furthermore, to have any chance of lasting success, the turquoise pendant surge strategy relies on a U.S. government bureaucracy that has consistently underperformed in nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can the U.S. Provincial Reconstruction Teams competently deliver and manage rebuilding efforts in a way they haven't before? Pentagon sources say they are extremely skeptical that the State Department and other components of the multi-agency effort are up to the task.

Finally, for the surge to work, the Bush administration has to get the politics right in Iraq and in Washington. That challenge may be the greatest of all. By opting for a bold plan that relies on an unpopular boost in troops, Bush has rejected the bipartisan cover and moderate approach offered by the Iraq Study Group. The decision further isolates him politically and raises the chance of mutiny among his fellow Republicans in Congress.

"After losing their majority, many Republicans in Congress are angry that they've been made to walk the plank on Iraq for too long, and some feel that the case for a change of strategy should have been made one or even two years ago," said Norman Ornstein, a congressional expert and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "So if the surge doesn't work, this starts to look a lot like Vietnam. Bush has to seriously worry about a 'Nixon scenario,' where a delegation of senior Republicans comes to the White House to pull the plug. At that point, it becomes nearly impossible to sustain our presence in Iraq."

If the politics in Washington are bad, the verifiably byzantine politics in Iraq present huge challenges for the White House. Anthony Cordesman, the longtime Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that in addition to all of the questions about the effectiveness of Iraqi troops, an even more critical question exists: "Whether we can provide the right balance of pressure and incentives to bring a deeply divided Iraqi government together.... None of that means that the new Bush strategy can't work. However, even some of the folks who helped craft it have told me privately that the odds of it working are less than even."

Michael O'Hanlon,, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution who has criticized the administration's handling of the war, nevertheless favors the surge plan. But he is skeptical that it can work in the end.

"The surge strategy raises all kinds of valid concerns, but most of those who oppose it don't have a better plan in mind, and I personally don't know what else we could do at this point that would be more productive," O'Hanlon said. Maliki's recent willingness to confront militias, he said, suggests that divided government in Washington and Democratic threats of withdrawal may finally be spurring the Iraqi politicians to action. "Somehow, we have to pull off an elaborate act where we make Iraqis fear that we're leaving, use that threat to shock them into good decisions, and then be willing to stay if they make the right moves." O'Hanlon added, however, "Even then, I would be surprised if the surge strategy were enough to turn the situation around in Iraq."

In Defense of Bush
Surge proponents, meanwhile, counter that the strategy offers the only chance of breaking the cycle of sectarian violence that has crippled political reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites. No low-risk strategies are left in Iraq, they say. Calls to accelerate the handoff of security responsibilities to Iraqi forces mask the real agenda of cutting U.S. losses and shifting the blame to Iraqis, according to this view.

Frederick Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former historian at West Point. Many elements of the Bush strategy, including the surge of five brigades into Baghdad, first appeared in a December AEI report that Kagan wrote with retired Army Gen. Jack Keane.

"The surge strategy is recognition that civil war has changed the equation in Iraq, and only by dampening down the violence will you give Maliki leverage to begin taking on the militias," Kagan told National Journal. "I can't look into Maliki's soul and tell you whether or not he will take that necessary step, but getting Baghdad under control will fundamentally change the political landscape and eliminate his principal excuses for not acting. Absent greater security, he almost certainly will not do what we're asking."

Despite his support for the Bush strategy, Kagan worries that the administration has fallen short in two areas -- sending troops into Baghdad for too short a time and relying too heavily on the Iraqis' taking the lead. In their report, Kagan and Keane recommend a surge in U.S. force levels lasting 18 to 24 months, a timeline that many experts doubt is feasible given the lack of political backing at home.

"When I hear Bush administration officials talk about this being an Iraqi plan with Iraqis in the lead, it also raises a big red flag to me," Kagan said. "Iraqi security forces have not been up to the task in the past, and this plan needs to succeed even if they fail again." Although he supports Iraqi and U.S. troops working in tandem, with Iraqis "kicking down the doors," Kagan stresses that the strategy represents a fundamental change in mission for U.S. troops -- from supporting Iraqi forces to taking direct responsibility for providing security to the Iraqi people. That shift may be a tough sell at home even though he thinks it's the right thing to do. "That's in our own national interests," Kagan argues, "because it will be a disaster for the United States if Iraq continues to implode and this turns into a regional war. We should drop this rhetoric that suggests we're just doing it for the Iraqis."

The Strategy Takes Shape
The swift, and largely negative, reaction to the Bush's administration's "new way forward" in Iraq -- with at least eight Republican senators publicly condemning the decision, the Senate set to debate a resolution denouncing the plan, and 65 percent of Americans against it -- suggests just how great and unexpected a departure it represents to a war-weary country.

As recently as November, for instance, the U.S. commander with responsibility for the Middle East told Congress that he did not believe he needed more U.S. troops for Iraq; he warned, moreover, that the military lacked sufficient ground forces to sustain a significant increase. Central Command's Gen. John Abizaid conceded that the unremitting violence had already forced him to keep 15 brigades in Iraq, or roughly 140,000 troops, far more than the 10 to 12 brigades he hoped to be down to by that time.

According to insiders, Abizaid and his top commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, were privately convinced that an increase in U.S. troops would just delay the Iraqis' assumption of responsibility for their own security and would hasten the day when an unsustainable operations tempo would seriously affect U.S. ground forces. With the United States approaching the four-year mark in Iraq, they also felt that a more pervasive presence of American forces on the streets would just provoke the Iraqi people; in a poll, a majority of Iraqi respondents had already said that it was "OK" for Iraqis to kill coalition forces. Both generals were known to support the minimalist approach to troop levels that their then-boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had advocated from the outset of the Iraqi Freedom campaign.

After Rumsfeld resigned in November, however, the Bush administration launched a series of strategic reviews of the deteriorating situation in Iraq, and the White House began to listen seriously to other voices. One such adviser was Keane, a gruff and plainspoken retired four-star general who had once turned down Rumsfeld's offer to head the Army. Keane assured the White House that the Army could sustain a surge in forces with extraordinary measures if the stakes were really as high as the president insisted.

Other influential voices included a secret "colonel's group" that was conducting the Pentagon's internal review and advising the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Marine Gen. Peter Pace. Notably, that group included Army Col. H.R. McMaster. Last year, Bush publicly praised McMaster's pacification of the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar by means of the classic counterinsurgency tactics of "clear, hold, and build."

The White House's search for fresh ideas inevitably led to the author of the Army's updated counterinsurgency doctine [PDF], Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who is credited with successfully applying its lessons in 2003 as commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul. A refinement of the Vietnam War-era tactics designed to win "hearts and minds," the doctrine poses paradoxes reinforced in the towns and cities of Iraq, including "The more you protect your force, the less secure you are" and "The more force used, the less effective it is."

The White House accepted the Iraq Study Group's recommendation to significantly increase the number of U.S. troops embedded with Iraqi army units as a way to accelerate their training and independence, and to improve their performance. In the White House's view, adopting that strategy and adding a surge of forces in support of Gen. Petraeus's updated clear, hold, and build doctrine would achieve a more decisive break with past approaches and would underscore Baghdad's role as the center of gravity in Iraq.

So despite continued misgivings among some senior military leaders, the Bush team settled on the surge strategy. "One minute we were still debating the plan and the administration's proposed timing, and the next minute everyone was saluting and moving out. We drank the Kool-Aid," said one knowledgeable Pentagon officer. Putting more forces into Baghdad is not inherently misguided, he stressed, pointing out that a similar surge of U.S. troops before the 2005 Iraqi elections succeeded in temporarily dampening the violence.

"But the sad truth is, the president has committed us to a new strategy that we will have a very hard time sustaining beyond a window that runs roughly from late spring to late summer," the senior officer said. "Even to get there, we have had to extend and accelerate deployments for people who are on their second, third, and even fourth combat tours. Believe me, the U.S. Army is going to be turning into a pumpkin sometime in August."

Straining the Force
The extraordinary measures that the Pentagon was forced into to mount the surge underscore the internal threats facing the armed forces. Even before the surge, the Defense Department had conceded that because of equipment shortages, its only "ready" units not already deployed were those soon to leave for Iraq and Afghanistan. Almost all of that handful of units are now being rushed to the fight, raising obvious questions about what forces would be available if a crisis erupts elsewhere. On a recent stop in Afghanistan, for instance, Secretary Gates heard a plea from commanders for an additional brigade, in anticipation of a spring offensive by the Taliban. In response, the Pentagon extended combat tours in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, some 4,000 soldiers from the Minnesota National Guard's 1st Brigade, 34th Infantry Division, got the news that they have to stay in Iraq up to four months beyond the end of their one-year tour, a serious blow to the morale of citizen-soldiers and their families. Paratroopers in the 2nd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, have already "surged" into Baghdad. This "Falcon Brigade" has deployed six times on short notice since September 11, and Army officials say that many of its soldiers are beginning their third and fourth tours in Iraq. Remarkably, one of the brigade's battalions had just returned from deployment in December; those soldiers had only a few weeks at home for the holidays before deploying to Baghdad.

The administration's plan subtracts a month from the training schedule for the Army's 4th Stryker Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division, based at Fort Lewis, Wash. The unit thus had to cancel its predeployment certification exercise at the Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. The military considers those exercises the final exams before units are declared ready for combat. The 4th Stryker Brigade is a new unit that the Army has essentially built from scratch, and some military experts worry about canceling its "proofing exercise."

"Whether it's worth taking that risk to buy three extra weeks on the ground in Iraq, I'll leave to the ground force commander there," said retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who commanded units in Iraq and has two sons in uniform. "My greater concern with this plan is that it's coming awfully late, and 21,000 extra troops don't represent a truly bold surge. I'm afraid it will have a far greater impact on the U.S. Army than on security in Baghdad."

Insiders say that the clock is already ticking on getting the additional five Army brigades into Baghdad -- the heart of the surge -- and that the time period for those brigades to show some progress will run out in August. In his confirmation testimony, Petraeus said that the United States should have a good idea whether his strategy is working in Baghdad by then, and whether it is opening a window for political progress and reconstruction.

In case the president decides to sustain the surge in Iraq beyond August, the Pentagon recently changed its mobilization policy to facilitate an involuntary call-up of National Guard combat units that have already served in the war. Guardsmen have been promised five years between call-ups and would undoubtedly see such an order as a breach of faith.

"We had anticipated that units which have already served a combat tour would not be called back up for deployment until 2009," said Lt. Col. Mike Mallord, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau in the Pentagon. "With the recent rule change, it certainly makes it more likely that that [the Pentagon will] be coming back at the Guard before that."

Some military planners question even more urgently whether U.S. government leaders are poised to take advantage of any lulls in the violence purchased with the sweat, blood, and lives of American soldiers. "If the rest of the government is not ready to step in when we create this temporary window of security -- and history suggests they won't be -- then we will have missed yet another critical opportunity in Iraq," said a senior officer in the Pentagon who has served two tours in Iraq. "If the extra Provincial Reconstruction Teams called for in this plan are not fully staffed and resourced, or if our ministry advisory teams are not significantly augmented, then several hundred more U.S. soldiers and marines will have died in vain as part of this plan."

The Civilian Follow-Up
When Col. McMaster was implementing his clear, hold, and build strategy in Tal Afar in 2005-06, his superiors in the 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment issued an urgent request for help in the critical "build" phase of the operation. After establishing a modicum of security, commanders were trying to wean young Iraqi men off the militia payrolls. People needed to see their lives improving before they would end their support for the insurgency. But despite repeated calls to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and up the military chain of command for on-the-ground expertise in reconstruction and economic development, much valuable time was lost.

"We fought very hard to get a representative from USAID to join us in Mosul, and it took months and months before he finally arrived -- and then, his ideas for economic development were major infrastructure projects with a long-term horizon of five years or more," said Col. Peter Bayer, then-chief of staff of the 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment. "I kept telling him we needed to create jobs today."

The regiment got a similar response when it requested help in establishing a justice system in the area around Mosul. The Army couldn't compel the handful of Justice Department lawyers in Baghdad's Green Zone to travel to the provinces.

"My point is that in counterinsurgency, you really have to apply all of your military, economic, political, and diplomatic resources," said Bayer, who has served two tours in Iraq. "While we have applied military with a capital 'M,' there has often been a real disconnect in how other agencies, like State, Justice, Agriculture, and USAID, went about tackling the problem of reconstruction and economic development. And I can tell you from personal experience," he added, "that if we do not adequately manage and resource the creation of jobs for Iraqis in Baghdad, the new plan is also unlikely to work."

Administration officials insist they have learned from their mistakes. The White House has been deeply embarrassed by accounts -- most notably in the book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief -- detailing the selection of U.S. civilian personnel for the Iraqi reconstruction effort based on political loyalty rather than expertise. Former Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer's focus on privatizing Iraq's command economy, rather than on launching public works projects that could have provided maximum employment, was likewise a noted mistake. Experts also say that awarding contracts for major infrastructure projects to U.S. firms that employed relatively few Iraqis was another lost opportunity.

The results of those failures are evident in Iraq today. Although the United States has spent nearly $15 billion on reconstruction projects, oil output is well below prewar levels. Other testaments to well-meaning incompetence abound: Baghdad residents average only 4.4 hours of electricity per day, scores of unfinished health clinics dot the landscape, and unemployment has surged along with the escalating violence.

Security Comes First
Perhaps the biggest mistake in the effort to rebuild Iraq, in the view of some experts, was the belief that meaningful economic development was even possible absent a base level of security that was never met in Baghdad and in other parts of the country.

"Iraq today is essentially a failed state that cannot consistently enforce the rule of law, secure its own people, or even deliver services in the face of a violent civil war," said Carlos Pascual, the former coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization at the State Department. "Frankly, in such an environment, it's next to impossible to get governmental and nongovernmental civilians to come in and effectively establish programs to employ the tens of thousands of people who need jobs. If you look at Bosnia and other civil wars, what you find is that economic activities only take root after a peace accord is signed."

Bush, as part of his strategy, has asked Congress for an additional $1.2 billion in reconstruction aid for Iraq. Significantly, that figure includes $350 million for the Commander's Emergency Response Program and $400 million for a civilian version of CERP -- flexible pools of money that local commanders and U.S. government representatives in Iraq can spend at their discretion.

After the State and Defense departments reached a deal to embed Provincial Reconstruction Teams with U.S. military units -- thus settling an acrimonious dispute between State and Rumsfeld over security for the teams -- Bush also included $414 million in proposed spending to nearly double the number of PRTs in Iraq. The Iraqi government has also promised to contribute $10 billion to the reconstruction effort.

"We're going to be focused on programs like community support, working with local leaders, local figures, local projects that are Iraqi-designed, that have Iraqi stakeholders, that are designed to improve the situation at a local level," said David Satterfield, the State Department coordinator for Iraq, testifying on January 25 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Experts see signs, however, that the interagency process that has consistently failed to coalesce behind the mission in Iraq remains disjointed and even dysfunctional. Some trace much of the problem to the Bush administration's chronically weak National Security Council, which lacks the power to crack the whip and bring agencies into line on Iraq policy.

"Because of all the checks and balances in our government, the different agencies are almost designed to work against each other," said a knowledgeable former administration official. "They only really cooperate when one of two things happen: Either the president establishes a clear vision that is shared among his Cabinet and thus flows down from the top to the bureaucracy; or else he empowers the NSC and the national security adviser to step in and put a halt to any interagency squabbling. Neither of those things ever happened under this president."

Nothing, however, focuses the mind quite so much as a hanging, as the saying goes, and administration officials insist that the dire situation in Iraq and the sense that the surge strategy is the last chance to reverse the slide toward civil war have re-energized the bureaucracy to fully back the effort.

"The military has a legitimate gripe," said a senior administration official, "because classic counterinsurgency doctrine requires very close civil-military integration, and that has been very hard to achieve in Iraq for a whole host of reasons, including tight security rules that restricted the travel of many civilians assigned to the embassy in Baghdad." As part of the new strategy, he said, the administration asked all of the brigade commanders in Iraq what civil support they required, and then used their responses to develop a list of 300 civilian positions that the U.S. government needs to fill. Because it takes, on average, six months to fill such positions, however, the administration official conceded that the military would have to substitute uniformed reservists with the requisite skills in the short term until government workers or contractors can take over.

"We've worked very hard to identify all of the impediments to a closely integrated civil-military team, and we're trying to knock each of them down as fast as we can," the official said. "It's still tough going, but I think it's working better than it ever has in the past."

Many military experts who have served in Iraq remain skeptical. Where was the diplomacy, they wonder, that would have forestalled a precipitous withdrawal of roughly half of British forces from Iraq this year, with most of the remaining forces to follow in 2008? Why was the State Department unable to stave off the bungled execution of Saddam Hussein, which disastrously undercut efforts to reconcile suspicious Sunnis? What has become of the United Nations' long-planned international donor's compact on Iraq that was supposed to have made significant resources available for reconstruction?

"I see little evidence with this new surge plan that the administration has corrected its biggest failure," said retired Army Maj. Gen. Eaton. "Time and again, they've shown a tendency to focus almost exclusively on military solutions to problems, without leveraging the full economic, political, and diplomatic might of our nation."

Iraqis Step Forward
A senior U.S. officer involved in training Iraqi security forces tells this story about the Iraqi Interior Ministry, a largely Shiite organization whose police forces have been accused of numerous abuses of Sunni prisoners and of ties to Shiite death squads. Last summer, a United Nations human-rights report [PDF] concluded that 1,400 detainees at one of the ministry's notorious detention facilities displayed signs of systematic "physical and psychological abuse." U.S. officials also had widespread suspicions that two of the ministry's highest-ranking police generals were in league with Shiite militias.

In response to American concerns, Jawad al-Bolani, who was brought in as an honest broker to head the ministry, fired 3,000 employees last year, suspended an entire police brigade on turquoise sets suspicion of its ties to death squads, and relieved the two high-ranking generals from direct command. In November, the ministry charged 57 employees, including top officers, with practicing torture.

"Every time we have brought our concerns to Minister Bolani about corruption or militia influence, he has acted on them immediately -- so, yeah, I definitely trust him," said a senior U.S. officer in Iraq. The police force's willingness to crack down on death squads and militia activity will be crucial in the "hold" phase of the new Baghdad strategy, and U.S. commanders know they have a lot riding on Bolani and other key Iraqis. "I'm cautiously optimistic that, with the extra training we've recently given the national police brigades, if they are ever going to be ready, now is the time," the American officer said.

On the eve of his departure to Iraq, Gen. Petraeus displayed the same cautious optimism about his Iraqi partners. He had already spoken with Gen. Babakir Zebari, the chief of the Iraqi Defense Staff. He is a former commander of the Kurdish pesh merga militia and an old acquaintance of Petraeus's. Zebari is training 25,000 troops to augment the Iraqi battalions that went to Baghdad below full strength, a persistent problem in a country that lacks legal redress to turquoise jewelry punish deserters. Still, U.S. commanders report that at least three of the promised Iraqi army battalions have already arrived in Baghdad and that, contrary to some predictions, the security-starved locals have greeted the largely Kurdish units with favor.

"The situation in Iraq is dire. The stakes are high. There are no easy choices. The way ahead will be very hard," Petraeus concluded in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. "Progress will require determination and difficult U.S. and Iraqi actions, especially the latter. Ultimately, the outcome will be determined by the Iraqis. But 'hard' is not 'hopeless.' "

For four years, Iraq has rewarded pessimists at every turn. The Bush administration has put its hopes in the ability of new military leaders and a new doctrine to buy a little more time and a measure of security in Baghdad. Shiites of goodwill could use that breathing room to marginalize the most radical elements in their midst. Sunni sheiks might respond by distancing themselves from the terrorists and from hard-line Baathists. The Iraqi parliament may react by reaching a deal on sharing oil revenues equitably among Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds, and then begin moving toward meaningful power-sharing and a workable federation. It could all still happen.

Of course, civil wars follow their own dynamic, and they cannot necessarily be driven by outside forces or artificially imposed timelines. In the worst-case scenario, the violence will accelerate, the benchmarks will be missed and many hundreds of young American and Iraqi soldiers will perish in propping open another window to nowhere. And then, U.S. forces will almost certainly begin a long, agonized withdrawal from central Iraq.

"People always say that things have to get worse before they get better, but in the Middle East, things sometimes have to get worse before they get even worse than that," said Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations. Once the Iraqis start failing to meet U.S.-imposed benchmarks, and Washington threatens to withdraw its forces from the conflict as a result, Haass says, a dangerous chain of events will be set in motion. "We assume that by giving them a glimpse into a dark future we can convince the Iraqis to act more responsibly, and I wish that were true," he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "However, I'm not so sure at this point that they won't jump into that dark future of civil war, and even regional conflict."