This week Kurdish leaders are clearing out of Baghdad to return to the north to consult with their constituents about a course of action. They have asked the new American civilian administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, to visit northern Iraq to confront the popular disenchantment.

It was Mr. Bremer who broke the news to Iraqi political groups on May 16 that the Bush administration was reversing its plan to support the immediate formation of an interim government here that would have put Iraqis in charge of the country with allied forces and Western technocrats in a supporting role.

In a "leadership council" meeting on Saturday night, the main Iraqi political groups agreed to submit a formal protest to the occupation authorities over the delay in putting an Iraqi government in place.

Mr. Bremer has spoken about organizing a national conference in July to create an interim Iraqi administration that would be subservient to his authority. Still, no concrete arrangements have been made, the Iraqi political groups said.

They also decided to send delegations to Washington and London to press the case for organizing elections here as soon as possible.

In little more than a week, during which the United Nations passed a resolution granting broad powers to the United States and Britain to run Iraq, the country's political groups have come to the realization that they have lost their bid to dominate the postwar transition.

One Iraqi figure who attended the meeting on Saturday, Hamid al-Bayati of the main Shiite Muslim group under Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, advocated bringing pressure on the United States and Britain by organizing demonstrations here and abroad against indefinite occupation. But there appeared to be no appetite yet for an open confrontation with the allied powers that toppled Saddam Hussein and his government, Iraqis who attended the meeting said.

Ahmad Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress, a coalition of political exiles, was acting like a government in waiting until Mr. Bremer's bombshell, is shutting down the political campus he was running at the once fashionable Hunting Club in Baghdad. He has sent his political operatives to Washington to find out what happened to the "promises" made by Bush administration officials that have now been rescinded.

His "Free Iraqi Forces," about 700 paramilitary fighters who briefly cooperated with the allies in the late stages of the military campaign, were abruptly dissolved this weekend by order of Mr. Bremer, who signed a directive intended to disarm another militia, the Badr Brigade of the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Only Kurdish forces, whose pesh merga guerrillas saw extensive military action in the north working with American Special Forces troops, have been allowed to keep their heavy weapons, artillery and armored vehicles during the transition to a new national Iraqi army.

The Kurdish chieftains from northern Iraq like Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, Islamic clerics like Ayatollah Hakim and his Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim forces, and well-heeled Iraqi exiles like Mr. Chalabi and Iyad Alawi are now searching for a role as an appendage to the occupying powers. Some say they hope that accepting whatever role they are offered now will not damage their chances to come to power later.

But no one seems to know what that role is going to be, even if they form the interim administration under Mr. Bremer's command.

"At least now not all the failures will be put at our doorstep, because we are not in charge," said Hoshyar Zebari, an adviser to Mr. Barzani.

At the Saturday leadership meeting, Mr. Talabani, who as a young revolutionary studied the works of Mao Zedong, said he wanted to engage in some Maoist self-criticism.

Though now an advocate of democracy, Mr. Talabani said, "I think we were very slow," according to a record of the meeting.

"This slowness," he said, and the failure of Iraq's main opposition groups to broaden quickly their ranks to become more representative of the nation they hoped to lead, "gave the Americans the excuse," he said, to push them aside and declare an occupation authority with an American administrator, Mr. Bremer, in charge of the country.

Barely seven weeks after the war ended, the Bush administration has veered away from the Iraqi opposition it helped to unite against Mr. Hussein. Mr. Bush and his allies have come to believe that only by placing a firm American hand at the helm of Iraq can Washington protect its victory while also marshaling international support for the huge reconstruction task ahead.

But Iraqi political figures here believe that the United States and Britain will not be able to sustain a strategy of suppressing Iraqi demands for a more rapid transition to sovereign Iraqi rule.
"The idea that for a year or more, there will be no Iraqi state, no Iraqi sovereignty, is wrong," said Adnan Pachachi, a former Iraqi foreign minister who also spent eight years in the 1960's as Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations.
 

Mr. Pachachi, who was encouraged by the State Department to enter the political process in Iraq, has opposed the idea that a "small group" of opposition parties should be allowed to take control of the country. He took aim at Mr. Chalabi's perceived ambition to take charge of a provisional government.

In the interview, he accused Mr. Chalabi of being a "little underhanded" in politics, but praised his skills as a lobbyist in Washington. 
 

After the allied military victory last month, Mr. Pachachi became a strong advocate for calling a broadly representative national conference of Iraqi political figures to draft a constitution and set an early date for elections for a sovereign Iraqi government.
The United Nations resolution has delayed the goal of Iraqi sovereignty for what some Western officials say could be two years.
"Can we participate?" Mr. Chalabi asked the group that gathered Saturday evening. "If we participate, can we stay unified?"

"And if we participate, will they engage us separately?" he asked, suggesting that the occupation authority might try to orchestrate the transition to get the kind of government it wants in Baghdad.
If there was a consensus that emerged from the meeting, it was that the ability of the Iraqi opposition to stay united would be tested in the months ahead and that the centrifugal forces of Iraq's ethnic and religious camps would position themselves to oppose Washington and vie for power once an electoral process and the drafting of a constitution gets under way.