If a recent report in the Wall Street Journal is anywhere close to accurate, it appears that the Iraqis will not be doing much of anything significant: "As Washington prepares to hand over power, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer and other officials are quietly building institutions that will give the U.S. powerful levers for influencing nearly every important decision the interim government will make."
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17007

Recent "edicts" handed down by Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority "created new commissions that effectively take away virtually all the powers once held by several ministries." A newly established "security-advisor position" will take "charge of training and organizing Iraq's new army and paramilitary forces, and put in place a pair of watchdog institutions that will serve as checks on individual ministries and allow for continued U.S. oversight." CPA advisors will also remain active "in virtually all remaining ministries after the handover."

And many of these arrangements are not intended to be temporary. According to the Journal, U.S. and Iraqi "proxies will serve multiyear terms and have significant authority to run criminal investigations, award contracts, direct troops and subpoena citizens."

According to the consortiumnews.com's Nat Parry, "Negroponte also was accused of concealing information about these secret activities from the U.S. Congress, including information about Battalion 316, which was organized, trained and financed by the CIA. The battalion specialized in torture using 'shock and suffocation devices in interrogations,' according to an investigation by the Baltimore Sun in 1995. Prisoners were often 'kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves,' the newspaper reported."

"Some critics of Bush's Iraq policy have suggested that the choice of Negroponte as ambassador may foreshadow even more aggressive tactics against Iraqi insurgents," Parry recently wrote.