Who will provide Iraqis the security they need to rebuild their country, hold elections and restart their lives?

As Iraqis bury their dead after the grisly bombings that killed hundreds on the holiest Shiite Muslim day of the year, this question haunts the entire U.S. project in Iraq.

The continuing violence threatens efforts to restore sovereignty and normality to the country. But U.S. occupation authorities haven’t built up Iraqi forces capable of fighting insurgents and terrorists.

As military analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies writes about Iraqi security forces: “Few really seem to be trained or equipped to deal with the most common means of insurgent attack.” During my last visit to Iraq in October, I saw how Iraqi police were outmatched and outgunned. There are more police now, but otherwise nothing much has changed.

How can it be that we aren’t training Iraqis to protect themselves against the most urgent threats? Senior Bush officials never seemed to have envisioned this kind of continuing postwar violence, even though experts warned repeatedly that Saddam’s fall would create chaos.

Not long before the start of the Iraq war, a senior administration official told me: “The one risk that strikes me as just totally exaggerated out of all proportion is the so-called risk of instability when Saddam goes.”

No wonder we sent too few U.S. troops to prevent massive postwar looting and mayhem. But this still doesn’t explain the way the Pentagon chose to handle the issue of Iraqi internal security after the war.

Despite massive looting, kidnapping and car-jacking, occupation czar Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army. U.S. officials insist it disbanded itself during the war. But the army could have provided a ready Iraqi security force. There were plenty of untainted mid-level officers who could have been recalled and in turn recalled their men.

Administration sources say that wasn’t done because Iraq was supposed to become a model new Arab country without a big army that might make coups or attack its neighbors or Israel. But the result was that Iraq had no armed force to fight a postwar criminal mafia, Baathist remnants and Arab terrorists. And the new Iraqi armed forces set up by occupation officials were not designed to take on such dangerous jobs.

Walter Slocombe, a former undersecretary of defense charged with designing Iraq’s new security forces, told me in October in Baghdad that the key new law-enforcement body in Iraq would be the police force. “In a normal society, the police do law enforcement,” he said, “so the critical point (for the coalition authority) is getting up the police force.”

Unfortunately, Iraq isn’t “normal.” Tens of thousands of new police are ill-equipped to fight terrorists or well-armed insurgents. U.S. forces, eager to pull back from the cities, didn’t help the hapless police in Fallujah who lost 25 men during a recent attack.

A small, new Iraqi army of 20,000 to 30,000 is being trained at a snail’s pace. A paramilitary Civil Defense Corps is also being trained, but Slocombe told me its main role would be to help U.S. military units. One U.S. official likened the corps’ role to that of “local native auxiliaries who were integrated into the Roman legions” during the Roman empire. If that’s the case, then the Roman (U.S.) legions will be left doing the dirty work for years.

Altogether, Iraqi armed forces are supposed to number more than 200,000; their training will cost more than $3 billion. But the question is whether they are the right kind of forces to do what Iraqis most need.

If not, the burden of fighting the terrorists and insurgents in Iraq will continue to fall on U.S. troops. This, even as special forces and CIA agents are reportedly being transferred to Afghanistan for a new effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden.

What’s equally unnerving is that angry Iraqi leaders are now demanding the right to take security into their own hands. And they aren’t talking about handing responsibility over to a national force that would fight for all Iraqis.

Shiite leaders want to send their armed militias out to look for terrorists. Kurds want to send their Pesh Merga militia to do the same.

This risks plunging Iraq into civil war, where undisciplined ethnic and religious militias terrorize the people. It risks creating a Lebanon.

It’s way past time for the Pentagon to rethink how to train an Iraqi force that can deal with the real Iraq, not the Iraq of Pentagon dreams. Otherwise, Iraqis may start sending their own vigilantes into the streets.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer.