Washington ? The Bush administration has quietly begun planning the transition to a new government in Baghdad, built around a leader emerging from inside Iraq and a foreign military presence flexible enough to meet challenges in the country’s three distinct regions, according to senior administration officials.

In contrast to military plans that are already on President Bush’s desk, the transition planning is still in a very early stage. But it reflects the growing sense of inevitability about both a conflict with Iraq and a regime change, even though Bush has not yet made the decision to go to war.

It also reflects growing pressure from Congress and U.S. allies to address problems that might come up in the historically unstable country after a conflict.

“Militarily, it may not be that difficult for United States. The problems will start afterward. It will be a lot more difficult than in Afghanistan,” said Remy Leveau, a former French diplomat in the Middle East now at the Institute for Political Studies in Paris.

In Europe and the Middle East, government officials have been concerned for months about whether the United States has thought through the long-term challenges of reshaping the country and the danger that ethnic, religious and tribal tensions would pull Iraq apart.

To address those issues, the National Security Council and the State Department were directed last month to develop a transition plan. Although the process is embryonic, the working assumptions and tentative conclusions underscore how different the process would be from dealing with Afghanistan after the ouster of the ruling Taliban there.

In a bid to prevent political fissures, the U.S. goal is to help craft a federal democracy that would allow the various regions and tribes some degree of autonomy.

“There would be some effort at reconciliation and some commitment to a single state that is not broken up into three pieces, that will have a representative, democratic model as its political basis,” Secretary of State Colin Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.

“We shouldn’t deceive ourselves, in our conversations on this subject; we recognize that we are on the cusp of a very, very demanding and long-term commitment if we go down this road,” he said. “It will take time, and I can’t tell you how many years.”

Powell also conceded that trying to “raise up a government” from Iraqis in the country and in exile would not quickly produce a model democracy.

U.S. planners now oppose either a government-in-exile or a candidate emerging from among the opposition based outside the country to replace President Saddam Hussein.

Instead, they favor allowing events on the ground to play the biggest role in determining the new leadership, with the U.S.-backed opposition largely in a supporting role, U.S. officials say.

“We know that there’s a strong possibility that either an individual or group of leaders inside Iraq could emerge with sizable support and look like the natural leaders, the natural next wave,” said an administration official.

Added a State Department official: “No Hamid Karzai is going to be anointed beforehand,” a reference to the militia commander who was selected at an international conference in Germany to lead Afghanistan.

The new focus is due in part to the administration’s assumption that an invasion would probably lead to the death of Saddam either during the confrontation or, more likely, at the hands of one of his inner circle, the sources added.

The first Bush and Clinton administrations made similar assumptions, which failed to materialize in the 11 years after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But U.S. planners predict the odds would increase sharply if the fates of those around Hussein also hang in the balance.