I was on the phone to Baghdad on Wednesday when I heard the sound of gunfire rattling in my ear.

“Don’t worry,” said my friend Fareed Yasseen, who was ducking behind a concrete pillar. “This is good news. The Iraqi national soccer team just beat Saudi Arabia, and people are firing in the air to celebrate.”

I’ll take any good news from Baghdad.

But if we want more good news — and want to avoid future disaster — it’s time to re-examine our reasons for being in Iraq.

We’re certainly not there to find weapons of mass destruction. President Bush says we’re there to bring democracy and to wage war against terrorism. He says, “We will defeat (the terrorists) there so we don’t have to face them in our country.”

I think the president means what he says. But there is something perverse about his logic. There were no terrorists in Iraq before the war — save for a few old has-beens in Baghdad, and a coterie of Islamists in the Kurdish-controlled north.

Now terrorists have flowed into Iraq, where they conduct heinous acts like the beheading of Nick Berg. We haven’t been able to find these monsters. Meantime, we keep postponing the return of real power to Iraqis — we plan only to return limited sovereignty on June 30. That, in turn, is likely to fuel more Iraqi violence.

So we are ensnared in a vicious circle: We can’t have elections because there’s too much violence — but we can’t get rid of the violence because we’re postponing elections.

The right reason to be in Iraq — the only legitimate reason — is to see Iraqis through to a free and fair ballot.

Back in October, the International Foundation for Election Systems, a respected Washington outfit, told the occupation authorities that credible elections could be held in six months. Yet U.S. officials have pushed back the date for full Iraqi elections to December 2005. A ballot for a constitutional assembly won’t be held until at least January.

On June 30, Iraqis will get a government chosen by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and occupation czar Paul Bremer. Why would they want another appointed body? A recent poll by the Coalition Provisional Authority — the occupation regime — showed that 52 percent of Iraqis had negative feelings about their current, appointed, interim council. The same poll showed that 80 percent had negative feelings about the CPA, and 82 percent distrusted coalition forces.

Yet the CPA is maneuvering to ensure that a huge new U.S. embassy will control Iraq’s government from the background. In a series of edicts, the CPA is snatching all sorts of powers away from Iraqi ministries and putting them under long-term control of U.S. officials or Iraqi proxies. In other words, Iraqis still won’t be running their country after June 30.

Why is the White House so fearful of giving Iraqis back control of their own country? None of the usual reasons suffice:

Iraq isn’t ready for democracy. Who are we to say, if Iraqis want a legitimate government that is elected? We told them we came to liberate them; we tell ourselves that we are not imperial rulers. Do we mean what we say?

It’s too dangerous to hold elections. Cambodians turned out to vote in huge numbers in U.N.-sponsored 1993 elections, even though the Khmer Rouge was still active. Iraqis would, too, despite terrorist threats.

Iraq will become like Bosnia, in which premature elections led to greater ethnic and religious divisions. Election expert Les Campbell, of the National Democratic Institute, who has worked on democracy-building in both Bosnia and Iraq, says that “the Bosnia analogy is not relevant here. There is no one recipe for democratic development.”

In fact, elections would be more likely to siphon off Iraqi energies from insurgent violence. They would involve Sunnis and Shiites in forming parties rather than sniping at U.S. forces. Yet U.S. officials still seem wary of an Iraqi vote, and my great fear is that if security worsens, they will push the first balloting back later than January.

One official who worked with the occupation authority told me: “I think they are trying to engineer things. Enough people (in the administration) still think if you do things in a certain way you will get a certain outcome.

“They are still looking for the right leader. … They feel circumstances still haven’t emerged which would lead to a liberal democratic outcome.” U.S. officials fear elections would return religious parties or a Baath Party redux rather than liberal democratic parties.

Well, we all would love Iraq to morph into a model democracy. But Iraqi political development will take decades. The harder we try to control it, the more likely we are to face Iraqi rejection and increased violence. Think Israel in Lebanon.

Back on March 26, 2003, President Bush said, “We will help the Iraqi people to find the benefits and assume the duties of self-government. The form of those institutions will arise from Iraq’s own culture and its own choices.”

He’s right, if he means it. You can’t expect Jeffersonian perfection, but a decent result is possible. Listen to Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution, just back from months in Iraq advising the CPA on democracy:

“I think it is still possible,” he says, “to have a political system in which there are elections and where in much of the country they are free and fair, and in which a government emerges which signifies legitimacy and sharing of power. If not a democracy, it would be a near democracy or a semi-democracy.”

Near democracy sounds like a fine beginning. But the administration has to be willing to risk elections, sooner rather than later. No guaranteed military bases, no guarantee of good U.S.-Iraqi relations.

But we’d have a better chance of good relations than if occupation continues another year.

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