WE'VE DISCUSSED IT BEFORE - BUT ANOTHER LOOK AT JUST HOW HUGE THIS JOB IS.

All of the challenges of rebuilding Iraq, and its police force, seemed to coalesce in a moment — the battle between the progress represented by the revamped police college and the continuing chaos and mounting security threats that threaten to swamp it.

Even as they start trying to teach democratic policing, the Americans here are confronting both basic problems, like how to set pay levels and get the money, and larger ones, like how to identify and purge Baathists from the force.

Superiors are grappling with the new phenomenon of insubordination in the ranks, while officers on the street are facing defiance — and more — from a no-longer-fearful public. Today, as two officers gave chase, thieves sprayed them with Kalashnikov fire.

All of this must be fixed, and soon.

Iraq is being remade in its entirety, with every institution — education, health care, the justice system, the economy — being reinvented. The world has done this kind of thing before, from Bosnia to East Timor, with mixed results. But it has not been done on such a large scale since the Marshall Plan, nor has America tried to do so much alone.

Without security, all else stalls. Doctors will not staff hospitals at night. Contractors will not repair buildings, roads and bridges. Investors will not put their money here. Iraqis are already growing to resent Americans who occupy Iraq but cannot protect them.

For now, the American military is Iraq's police force, operating 1,000 daily patrols nationwide. But the military is a blunt instrument for the job, and as attacks on American troops increase, it must balance protecting Iraqis with protecting itself. More important, no one — not the Americans, and certainly not the Iraqis — wants the American military policing Iraq forever.

Its a good story. Read it here.