Muqtada al-Sadr, the notorious radical cleric, is making trouble just across town. Worse, a car bomb exploded minutes earlier, killing a dozen or so Iraqis and injuring 50 more. And a blinding sandstorm is only an hour away from blowing in and shutting the whole place down.

Yet Lt. Col. Michael Hilliard, U.S. Army by way of Fort Hood, Texas, sits placidly on a couch in the grimy headquarters of the provincial government here. He may be churning on the inside, but he sips tea as if he had nothing else in the world to do on this, Day 1,113 of the war in Iraq.

Col. Hilliard does so because the governor of Holy Najaf, Asaad Sultaan Abu Gelal, wants to talk. And have more tea. And talk. And listen to loyal declarations from his functionaries in the amen corner. And pose for some photographs. And eat a leisurely lunch. And then talk some more.

Blood running in the streets? Here, colonel, enjoy some Canada Dry orange soda and perhaps a piece of cake. There are many things left to discuss, such as the governor's thoughts on Finland, where he long ago passed several years of exile from Iraq.

"You learn patience," Col. Hilliard says later. "And I'm not a patient man."

Thus is war waged in Najaf, the sprawling province whose namesake capital city lies 65 miles south of Baghdad. The Army's 3rd Battalion, 16th Field Artillery of the 4th Infantry Division masses itself at Forward Operating Base Duke, ready for combat but with no one to fight.

Soldiers from the 3-16 track the local economy and help train the Iraqi army. Intelligence officers collect tips on what the clerics are saying in the mosques. Strategists map public opinion battles.

But they leave almost all actual security operations in Najaf to Iraqi military and police.

All the while, battalion commander Hilliard makes trips into town several times a week - interpreter in tow - to hear the governmental gossip and show the face of a diplomat. He is the warrior as public relations man.

It's a classic counter-insurgency technique increasingly embraced by the U.S. military. With the 4th Infantry Division now in its second tour of Iraq, this represents the approach now mandated by high command.

And it means that victory here, if it is to be won, will be incremental and agonizingly amorphous: one road, one electrical project, one cup of tea at a time.

Many things are not clear, and sometimes nothing is. Such is Iraq.

"It ain't like cutting your grass," the lieutenant colonel says, "where you can stand back and say, `Man, that looks good.'"

No one knows this part of Iraq will be free, stable, safe and self-supporting. "It's not going to turn around in five years," Col. Hilliard says. "It's just not."

U.S. officials here say that if all goes well, the change may come in a generation.

"The way to kill the insurgency is to gain people's support, where the guy living next door to the insurgent gets tired of the violence," the lieutenant colonel says. "The head of the snake is going to get squeezed off. It's just a matter of time."

Col. Hilliard is 42, with dusty gray hair and a Skoal habit. He runs a tight base and is admired for his tactical skills. When he is not happy, his stare freezes junior officers. He can be trenchantly profane and hammer blunt. Out of earshot, some subordinates call him "Iron Mike."

Raised in Illinois, he lives in Kempner, Texas, near Lampasas, where he and his wife keep horses. His most prized possession is a Harley Davidson.

Col. Hilliard became base commander of Camp Duke on Dec. 29, 2005. Seven days later he was riding in the second vehicle of a Humvee convoy headed for Forward Operating Base Kalsu, north of here.

A roadside bomb, an explosive projectile, penetrated the third Humvee in the convoy. It killed five men: a major, a captain, two sergeants and a private. Among them was Sgt. Johnny Peralez Jr. of Kingsville, Texas.

"The worst day of my life in the Army," Col. Hilliard says.

These were the first deaths of soldiers from Camp Duke in more than a year. The new commander had to decide how to respond. His first instinct: "I wanted to go out there with every machine gun I had and start revenging."

He wasn't the only one. "Every guy in here wanted to saddle up, go out there and kick ass," says Staff Sgt. James Petrik of Killeen, Texas. "I would have saddled up a cockroach if I had to."

But, in a decision unpopular with some at the base, Col. Hilliard bided his time. He brought in the Iraqi military. He assembled intelligence. He built a case.

"It took us about 35 days before we had a pretty good picture of who had done what," he says. Four men were captured in subsequent raids and sent to Abu Ghraib prison. Another died in a shootout with Iraqi soldiers.

"We could have gone out there and kicked in doors," Col. Hilliard says. "But this is a revenge-based society. You go into a home on a raid, you drag an old man out of the house, you put the old man in the dirt, you shame him in front of his family.

"Somewhere, sometime, there's going to be an American soldier who's going to pay for that."

Najaf is almost wholly Shiite, so it has been spared the sectarian violence ravaging other parts of Iraq. (The rival Sunnis, though in the country's minority, controlled Iraq under Saddam Hussein.)

The province has enjoyed relative peace since August 2004, when U.S. and Iraqi forces fought the militia of Shiite cleric al-Sadr for three weeks.

At least nine Americans were killed in combat that ended only after intervention by one of Iraq's most powerful religious figures, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Since then, soldiers from Camp Duke have kept their distance from the al-Sadr militia. "We call them `Jimmy's boys,'" one American officer says.

The origin of the phrase is unclear, but it's used, a captain says, "so the governor won't know who we're talking about."

U.S. military convoys steer clear of the parts of the city that al-Sadr controls. "They really don't want to fight us," Col. Hilliard says. "But they want to make it look like we want to fight them."

In other words, it's a propaganda war, one that U.S. officials acknowledge they're fighting at a distinct disadvantage, if not occasionally losing. The al-Sadr side floats a rumor - recently it was that coalition soldiers had seized all weapons from the Iraqi police - and Americans must persuade local officials to respond on their behalf.

Hanging in the Camp Duke tactical operations center is a sheet of paper labeled the "JAM-o-meter," with the acronym referring to al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi militia. Its scale runs from "public threats made" to "uprising against" coalition forces.

"He's important from the standpoint that he got a lot of people to listen," Col. Hilliard says of the cleric. "Muqtada preys on the young, the uneducated and the poor, which is a fair amount of people in this part of the city."

While Saddam Hussein built palaces for himself, places like Najaf languished in Third World conditions. Now it is strewn with garbage, and stinks of sewage. Pools of stagnant water stand in the unpaved backstreets.

The roads are full of battered, rusted cars that look as if they had been pulled from the junkyard and nursed back to life. Their drivers line up for miles to buy gas.

But, American and Iraqi officials insist, progress is on the march. They're building wide new roads. A soccer field has grass and latrines. And, the governor adds, "tourism is a little bit better now."

One of the biggest draws, potentially, is the Najaf Cemetery, said to be the largest graveyard in the world, an ancient sea of tombstones that stretches to the horizon. But it's not exactly tourist-friendly.

These days a loosely assembled group of Iraqi police stands guard over the cemetery from a hillside hut. They eye strangers warily.

"Adam is buried here," one of the soldiers boasts through a translator. He is asked for directions to the grave. He shakes his head and looks at his shoes.

A recent series of events demonstrates both the promise of Najaf and the quandary it poses for U.S. forces.

It is a hot Thursday in April. Officials want to show off a new $5 million electrical substation for Najaf, built with American money. So they have a ribbon cutting.

At the same time, the al-Sadr crowd floods its part of town with marchers for a political demonstration. Col. Hilliard orders air surveillance of the marchers. The governor complains that the jets are flying too low.

The ribbon cutting occurs without a problem. No surprise there, for it is guarded - in this, purported to be one of the safest cities in Iraq - by at least 100 soldiers, police and private security guards.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has overseen the project, sends six representatives to the ribbon cutting. Twenty private operatives with semi-automatic rifles accompany them.

Later, the car bomb goes off a few miles away. That night, back at Camp Duke, Col. Hilliard sits in his operations center, monitoring the aftermath of the bombing. He fidgets like someone itching for action, and has his Quick Response Team of soldiers in their Humvees, ready to roll.

But he must wait for the governor to ask for assistance. The governor does not ask, and the team does not roll.

Two days later, Col. Hilliard dispatches Capt. Brian Covert to meet with Gen. Abbas Kareem Hussain Moadal, head of the Iraqi police in Najaf. The colonel wants Capt. Covert, of Chicago, to find out if police have any new information on who detonated the car bomb.

This was, after all, the deadliest insurgent action in Najaf in years. If there are more, the consequences could be dire. But the Iraqi police, officially in charge of the investigation, do not appear to be working the case all that rigorously.

"It's hard to find people," the general says with an untroubled shrug. "They disappear easily. It's going to be a while before we can catch them."