BAGHDAD – Around the corner from Monday’s car bombing in the district of al-Khudra, where the bomber missed the police station but incinerated 16 cars along with several shoppers, a woman was screaming.

Elegantly dressed under a modest black cloak, in this district of wealthy one- and two-family homes, she cried, “I put the responsibility on the Americans, because they came here. Iraqis are going crazy. We don’t have the strength to endure any more.”

These words sum up the dilemma facing occupation authorities. Even Iraqis who welcomed U.S. forces are increasingly angry that they can’t provide stability in Baghdad. Carjackings and kidnappings have subsided slightly, but a wave of car bombs and rocket attacks has left the city reeling. Twelve-foot-high concrete blast barriers have gone up around my hotel – typical of what is happening around the city.

Iraqis argue that they must be given more control over their own security, quickly, because they know the local situation better. U.S. officials from President Bush on down claim that’s their goal. But the reality on the ground tells a different tale.

Many Iraqis trace the security vacuum to the fact that the Americans abolished the 400,000-strong Iraqi army. U.S. officials insist that the army dismissed itself by deserting during the war. But key units could have been recalled, if that had been a U.S. priority.

This wasn’t done, because top U.S. officials wanted to make a clean breach with Iraq’s past.

Things have gotten so desperate that the acting president of Iraq’s interim Governing Council, Iyad Allawi, has suggested that units of the old army be recalled. When asked about press reports that such a project is under consideration, a visibly annoyed Walter Slocombe snapped, “Absolutely not true.” Slocombe is a former undersecretary of defense charged with creating a new Iraqi army.

Some former Iraqi officers will be rehired to help retrain the new army but not on any large scale basis. Another Allawi proposal – to train an Interior Ministry strike force made up largely of Kurdish and Shiite militias – makes the Americans nervous but hasn’t been totally rejected. Yet there are no signs it might be acted on soon.

A nervous Pentagon has has cut in half the original two-year time frame to build a new Iraqi army of 40,000 and hopes to finish by mid-September 2004. But only one battalion of 800 has graduated in the six months since Baghdad fell. By contrast, Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne in Mosul, had a battalion of Iraqis trained within the first month. That kind of speed is needed now.

Moreover, the role of new Iraqi forces seems designed merely as an adjunct to coalition forces. Slocombe told me the new Iraqi army will be “additional to coalition units,” relieving U.S. forces of jobs like patrolling borders, manning checkpoints, and other routine military tasks.

But the big battle in postwar Iraq will be the struggle against terrorism. American involvement has made the country a mecca for Islamic jihadis. This new Iraqi army won’t be geared up to handle that terrorist threat.

Nor will the new Iraqi police force, which commands little respect among Iraqis who see it as having scant authority and power.

Nor will the new Iraqi Civilian Defense Corps (ICDC) – which some have mistakenly likened to a potential national strike force – but which in reality will be integrated by platoons into U.S.military units.

So the main burden of hunting former Saddamists and terrorists will continue to fall on U.S. forces. Slocombe concedes that “for quite a long time, at least a year, the big sensitive take-downs of terrorist or politically powerful organizations” will require Iraqis to rely on “American technology and communications.”

If you eliminate the old army but don’t train (or trust) Iraqis to do the hard jobs, then U.S. troops will have to remain in Iraq indefinitely to secure the country. Those troops will remain a magnet for terrorists and increase local opposition to occupation. Surely this is a strategy that requires more thought.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

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