Guest editorial: Hurry up, but carefully

Surely, though, the administration wants to avoid a slapdash reconstruction and security-imperiling U.S. exit as much as anyone, and there were certainly extra-electoral reasons for the surprise meeting this week in which L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, met with top officials in the White House.

One reason is that the Iraqi Governing Council seems to be loafing as if it does not care about deadlines for pushing ahead with the establishment of a new constitution and government. Another is that insurgents are launching attacks on Americans and others on a daily basis. At last count, there were 394 Americans dead in the war.

It is crucial that those lives counted for enhanced national security, and that won't be the case if the next Iraqi government gives way to forces friendly to terrorists and hostile to the United States. To achieve a decent, representative and stable government as quickly as possible, the administration reportedly considered a number of ideas in the meeting between Bremer, the vice president, the secretary of Defense, the secretary of State and the national security adviser.

The next step is to finally decide which, if any, of those ideas to act on. Some critics make such decisions sound easy, but they are not -- not when you are balancing the need to move expeditiously with all the other needs in a situation as replete with uncertainties as this one.