WASHINGTON — The good news is that Saddam Hussein was yanked out of his rat hole and put behind barbed wire where he isn’t a threat to anyone. The better news is that the U.S. military cannot be defeated in Iraq, not by terrorist car bombs, booby traps and snipers.

The bad news is that Iraq is still America’s to lose, or America’s to throw away.

If it goes south it will be due to the extraordinary inter-agency bickering, bureaucratic constipation, self-imposed isolation and misguided personnel policies of the Coalition Provisional Authority that runs civil administration and nation-building in a place where everything is broken.

In short, America could still bleed to death from self-inflicted wounds that date to well before the signal was given to invade Iraq.

Secretary of State Colin Powell was the only top official in the Bush administration who thought there was a need for postwar planning and postwar action. Powell’s people prepared a detailed study of what might be needed after the war. They wrote a plan thick as a big city phone book.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his key aides, however, ordered the director of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Aid, Lt. Gen. (retired) Jay Garner, to ignore State’s report and recommendations – and also told him he was forbidden to hire 32 of the best experts on Iraq.

Rumsfeld and Co. believed what they were told by the Iraqi exiles led by Ahmed Chalabi: There was no need for postwar planning because the Iraqi army would surrender in place, be sanitized of the worst of Saddam’s butchers and then be put to work on America’s behalf. Security wouldn’t be a problem in any case, they said, because the Iraqi people would shower the invaders with rose petals.

With the wrong idea of what was needed, they prepared for a massive humanitarian relief effort to feed thousands of refugees who never materialized. Without adequate staff, without even a secure communication link, Garner and ORHA floundered.

Exit Garner. Enter Ambassador Paul Bremer and the newly christened Coalition Provisional Authority, still firmly under Rumsfeld’s thumb. Only now did the administration begin to organize for reconstruction and nation-building.

Eight months were lost while the original mistakes were compounded. One of Bremer’s first actions was to dissolve the Iraqi army, offering no hope to a bunch of newly unemployed soldiers, armed, trained and angry.

An Iraqi Governing Council was installed without sufficient representation of the Sunni Arab minority, a quarter of Iraq’s 24 million people.

The false impression that the Sunni members of Saddam’s Baath Party would be purged from public life down to the least member took hold because the CPA’s strategic communications plan to communicate with the Iraqi people was broken. It remains broken.

Meantime, the CPA took on administrators and officials who serve only 90 days in Iraq before rotating home, severely limiting their ability to make even a small difference in a situation that cries out for a big difference. It must be noted that the civilians are pulling three-month tours while American soldiers do a year.

The CPA and Bremer, hunkered down in Saddam’s main marble palace and isolated behind the heavily fortified and guarded Green Zone, walled off from those they would govern and help, report only to the Department of Defense – at Rumsfeld’s insistence. Though they work for DOD and Rumsfeld, they take an arm’s-length attitude toward the American troops and commanders in Iraq. The CPA, which has billions in reconstruction aid, has little or no ability to identify and fund vital reconstruction projects in the insecure areas of the country. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army units occupying those dangerous places are without the money to fund local and regional projects that might offer hope to the locals and some reason not to take up the gun.

While auditors and inspectors general and congressional committees pick away at the smell of scandal in all the outsourced contracts – cost-plus, of course – for supplying wildly overpriced gasoline and kerosene and for building and running all those Army facilities, Iraqis grow angrier as they wait in lines five miles long and two cars wide for a chance to buy a tank of gasoline.

Secretary Rumsfeld must have the date July 1, 2004, circled in red on his calendar. No matter how big a mess his people make of reconstructing a nation, on that date the CPA will become a U.S. embassy with a thousand officials and employees.

The mess then will be handed over to Colin Powell and the State Department, the very people Rumsfeld has frozen out of the process.

Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young.”