US policy in the Middle East is hitting a wall of problems, writes Conor O'Clery in Washington.
Six weeks after toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein in a successful military campaign, US policy in Iraq and in the Middle East is unravelling, and new and critical challenges are arising for the Bush administration.
As Iraq slides into lawlessness, Washington's timetable for handing authority to Iraqis has been set back and the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, has put off a meeting with President Bush tomorrow to discuss a US- backed road map to peace, after suicide bombings in Jerusalem.
Meanwhile the terrorist attacks in Riyadh and Casablanca provided a fresh reminder that the US has failed to defeat al- Qaeda, the organisation blamed for the September 11th attacks.
The American administrator in Iraq, Mr Paul Bremer, insisted yesterday he was pushing ahead with the creation of an Iraqi interim authority. He denied the process had been delayed and said in the northern Iraq city of Mosul that he would hold more talks with Iraqi political leaders later this month on the establishment of the interim authority.
After a tense meeting in Baghdad on Friday, Iraqi groups accused Washington of breaking its promise to hand real power to Iraqis. The New York Times reported that Mr Bremer and British officials had told Iraqi leaders of an indefinite delay in forming a national assembly and interim government.
The dispute has pitted members of the once-exiled pro-American Iraqi National Congress against the US team in Baghdad.
The US media carried lengthy reports at the weekend on how the chaos in Baghdad was squandering the initial goodwill expressed by many Iraqis towards the US administration.
At the United Nations, the US and the United Kingdom presented a revised draft resolution on Friday to the 15-member Security Council in which they demanded expansive powers to manage Iraq and its oil revenues after lifting UN sanctions.
Russia, China and France are however seeking major concessions, including a larger UN role, to bring about a unanimous vote, as the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, said he wanted this week.
Clouding the debate are comments from Mr Philip Carroll, the former Shell executive appointed by the Pentagon to chair a commission to advise Iraq's oil ministry, suggesting that Iraq may disregard quotas set by OPEC, the Organisation of Oil Exporting Countries. They may elect to do that when oil was flowing again, he told the Washington Post, and oil contracts signed under the old regime - many with Russia, China and France - may be void or subject to renegotiation.
His remarks will give ammunition to critics who have argued that the real purpose of the US- led war was to create a government which would break OPEC.
The decision by Mr Sharon to postpone his visit to Washington comes at a time when the White House commitment to the road map for peace, drawn up by the US, the UN, Russia and the EU, is being tested.
Mr Bush is under international pressure to persuade Mr Sharon to go along with the plan, which includes the end of settlements, but is being pulled the other way by conservative Christian groups and many members of Congress who see the conflict as a war between Judeo-Christian and Islamic values.
"The enemies of freedom are not idle and neither are we," Mr Bush said in his weekly radio address on Saturday, referring to the bombings in Riyadh, adding that America was "hunting down al-Qaeda killers".
"With the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan," the US had removed allies of al-Qaeda and cut off sources of terrorist funding and half of al-Qaeda's leadership had been captured or killed.
Criticism of White House foreign policy, muted during the war, is rising in the US, however. Democratic hopefuls for 2004 cited the weekend suicide attacks as evidence that the Bush administration is weak on terrorism.
In a debate for Democratic presidential candidates in Des Moines on Saturday, Senator Bob Graham of Florida accused Mr Bush of letting al-Qaeda off the hook. "We had them on the ropes," he said, "and then we moved resources out of Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight the war in Iraq. We let them regenerate."