Baghdad, Iraq ? Iraq’s American-backed administration failed in its first week to choose a president, abandoning that mission in favor of a weak, three-man rotating leadership. The top U.S. official in Iraq — who hand-picked the Governing Council — returned to Washington Saturday.

The council, agonizingly shepherded into existence by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator for Iraq, was announced last Sunday, saying its first order of business was the election of a president. When that did not happen after six days in session, officials of the Iraqi government told The Associated Press on Saturday that it would share the leadership job among at least three of 25 members.

Meanwhile, thousands of Shiites marched on the U.S. military and political headquarters in a former presidential palace in Baghdad. They were protesting because they said the U.S. military briefly surrounded the house of a Shiite cleric in the holy city of Najaf after he issued an anti-American sermon during Friday prayers.

The military said it was checking whether they had taken any action against the cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who called the Governing Council an assembly of “nonbelievers” and said he would form a rival political body.

Bremer had given Shiites — who were harshly oppressed by Saddam’s Sunni-dominated regime — a slim majority on the governing council. But most of the Shiite members are secular figures or moderate clerics.

The U.S. administrator left Baghdad unannounced Friday and was expected to be in Washington for about a week. His Baghdad office said the 61-year-old former diplomat and counterterrorism expert would visit the U.S. capital for consultations. He also was scheduled to appear on three weekly U.S. television interview programs today.

In Baghdad this week, Bremer nearly disappeared from public view after the council was announced, an apparent bid to diminish the widely held perception among Iraqis and the rest of the world that the new Governing Council was an American puppet.

Bremer’s office did not respond to requests for an assessment of the council’s first week, but a spokesman for one council member issued a short statement.

“There is a general agreement that the presidency should be on a rotational basis because each political group in the council should shoulder an equal role and equal responsibility,” said Ali Abdul-Amir, spokesman for council-member Iyad Allawi of the Iraqi National Accord.

The three likely members of the rotating presidency will be a leading Shiite politician, a highly respected Shiite cleric and former Foreign Minister Adnan Pachachi, a council source told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The 80-year-old Pachachi, a Sunni Muslim, served in the government that Saddam’s Baath Party ousted in a 1968 coup. He will be joined in the leadership troika by 78-year-old Mohammed Bahr al-Uloum, a cleric who returned from London after the 1991 Gulf War, and Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and also a Shiite cleric.