Paris ? While President Bush and his aides lobbied key figures working on a new constitution in Baghdad last week, Iraq’s terrorist forces were busy targeting electric power lines in the countryside. Their priorities of destruction reveal how the terrorists intend to win the war they wage – and how they can be countered.

Bush ended a lengthy and useful period in which Iraqis were given room to chart their own future when he called Shiite leader Abdul Aziz Hakim on Wednesday to express U.S. concern about the draft constitution. The White House is said to have sent a parallel message to Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani.

Bush added a sweetener to his reservations by inviting Hakim to visit the White House, according to an account of the conversation given to several people in Baghdad by Hakim. Bush’s intervention came several days after the Shiites and Kurds had reached agreement on a formula to give their regions significant autonomy under a decentralized federal government.

The president’s tardy and apparently unpersuasive championing of resistance by the Sunni minority to federation in any meaningful form stirred confusion about U.S. intentions in Baghdad. It also echoed concerns voiced privately in Baghdad in recent days by British diplomats and public warnings from King Abdullah of Jordan, a favorite of Bush, who has predicted disaster if the Shiite majority and the non-Arab Kurds play a dominant political role in their own country.

American hesitation over a draft agreed to by political leaders representing 80 percent of Iraq’s 26 million people will embolden the ex-Baathists and foreign jihadists who stoke the rebellion in the Sunni-inhabited areas of Iraq. Until now, they have shown relatively little interest in constitutions of any kind.

But the insurgents have made the sustained targeting of infrastructure a major part of an increasingly sophisticated campaign to destroy public confidence in the Iraqi government. The rebels want to reinstall terror as the governing principle of Iraq and prevent free votes on the constitution in mid-October and for a new government in December.

Instead of set battles, the insurgents mount terrorist spectaculars – coordinated bombings and attacks on civilians – and have moved from hitting “random targets of opportunity to sophisticated planning with strategic and tactical objectives against specific high-value targets,” according to a recent analysis by a private security firm in Iraq.

The attacks are aimed at spreading fear and anger in the population, beginning with the Sunnis. Defeating these tactics will require more U.S. help for Iraqis in protecting critical infrastructure and less U.S. pressure on Hakim and others to grant Sunni leaders aligned with the insurgents an effective veto over the constitution – which only increases the intimidation effect.

Repeatedly over the past 18 months, big chunks of U.S. aid money – at least $3.4 billion, according to one report – intended for repairing or building Iraqi infrastructure were shifted into increased spending on Iraqi forces, military equipment and other direct “security” needs.

“We have been able to increase production of electricity, but we can’t get the increases to consumers because of sabotage,” Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi told me by telephone from Baghdad last week. “The power grid is now a primary target for the Baathists.”

The crippling psychological effect of this reverse “hearts and minds” campaign by the terrorists was illustrated last week by an attack on electric lines that prevented water from being pumped into Baghdad – just as the politicians reached preliminary agreement on a constitution devoted to high-mined principles of freedom and democracy.

Chalabi – the target a year ago of accusations of treason and chicanery leveled in the press by anonymous U.S. officials whom he had apparently antagonized – has survived that smear campaign and emerged as a key policymaker in Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari’s government. Chalabi today works smoothly with U.S. commanders on his primary portfolio: infrastructure protection.

Changes in security on Iraq’s pipelines helped increase oil exports from 1.4 million to 1.6 million barrels a day in July, Chalabi said. With U.S. help, the government was able to deploy regular Iraqi army units to replace or oversee tribal guards, who had a vested interest in making the pipelines leaky and unsafe enough for their U.S.-provided salaries to continue.

Chalabi landed in hot water with the American overseers of occupation in part because of his abrasive insistence that they did not understand Iraqi culture and priorities well enough to make those kind of distinctions – and refused to listen to Iraqis who did.

He declined to discuss the constitution when we spoke on Wednesday, and went out of his way to praise U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad for his low-key support for the drafting process. But Chalabi’s original point – that Iraqis are ready to choose their own form of government and leaders – seems to have been lost once again at the White House just as it becomes even more relevant.