Optimism for Iraq?

[Adex_Xeda]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial ... =110005287



Half-Full in Iraq
As sovereignty returns, there's cause for optimism.

BY ROBERT L. POLLOCK
Wednesday, June 30, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

It was at the beginning of May last year that I first arrived in a free Iraq. It had been three weeks since the fall of the Saddam statue in Baghdad's Firdous Square, but Iraqis still sought out pale faces on the street to whom they might offer "thanks" for the liberation. One man was all smiles as he showed off scars he said he received at Abu Ghraib, then notorious only as Saddam's chamber of horrors. To take a ride in an American humvee was to risk not a roadside bomb but a tired arm from waving back at beaming children. And as I traveled throughout Baghdad and beyond over the next few weeks with my driver/translator--who only a month or so earlier had been a MiG pilot in the Iraqi air force--the last thing on my mind was kidnapping or the name of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Two weeks ago I returned to Iraq with Paul Wolfowitz and incoming coalition commander George Casey, who barnstormed the country discussing security and the political transition with U.S. forces and the incoming Iraqi government. A year of car bombings and assassinations has changed a lot of things for the worse. Yet as sovereignty returned to Iraqis Monday, I found myself in some ways more optimistic than ever.

Why? Because if the past year couldn't drive Iraq into chaos--and despite what you see on the event-driven nightly news reports, it hasn't come close--probably nothing will. Iraqis have weathered a diabolical campaign of sectarian terror aimed at pitting them against each other; an attempt by a renegade cleric to turn Iraq's Shiite majority against the coalition; and some serious missteps by the occupying powers. If more Americans are having second thoughts about whether the war was worth it, there's little such sentiment in Baghdad. "Saddam Hussein's regime was a car bomb every day," says Barham Salih, the new deputy prime minister. "We can all complain about the uncertainty, but we cannot forget about where we came from." Interim President Ghazi Yawer concurs, describing the past year as "90% good" and only "10% bad"--"we got rid of the most vicious regime."





American commanders, too, paint a cautiously optimistic picture. "The theme of this briefing is that the glass is half-full. Things are heading in the right direction," one of them told Mr. Wolfowitz, offering a report similar to the ones we heard from other military divisions as we crisscrossed the country in Blackhawks and C-130s. The bottom line: Attacks on coalition forces remain way down since violence flared in early April, and Iraqis themselves increasingly are coming forward with valuable intelligence. One American unit reported that whereas some 98% of attacks in their area had been against coalition forces, 20% to 40% are now against fellow Iraqis. This is tragic, but it is not indicative of a popular "insurgency" or "resistance" movement gaining strength. The threat remains Islamist and Baathist terrorists whose only hope is to intimidate those who'd help build a new Iraq.
Yet Iraqis continue to line up for service, even outside security-force recruiting stations that have been frequent objects of attack. One coalition civilian staffer points out that some 2,000 groups have registered to be legally recognized NGOs, and that there were 1,800 applications for just seven slots on the commission to oversee elections. "Iraqis are trying hard to make it themselves and they're impatient with our slowness," says the official, who has previous democracy-building experience in the Balkans. "Iraqis are way more advanced than the Bosnians" in terms of taking the initiative, he adds.

The most hopeful sign of recent months is how decisively Iraq's Shiite majority rejected Muqtada al-Sadr's April bid to turn them against the coalition and away from the electoral path. Sadr's men were routed by a combination of local intelligence and brilliant soldiering by Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey's First Armored Division. The division's commanders say that what's left of Sadr's Mehdi Army actually has turned in its heavy weapons and that the current cease-fire appears to be genuine.

That cease-fire, by the way, was brokered with a lot of help from Ahmed Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress the First Armored credits with having provided valuable intelligence and loyal men for the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. That view from the ground squares with the Chalabi I've known for some years, and is a different picture than the one painted by his enemies in Washington bureaucracies and New York editorial offices.

The big problem remains the one that touched off April's troubles: Fallujah. Located only 30 miles or so west of Baghdad along the critical highway joining the Iraqi capital with with Amman in Jordan, the city is still a factory of Baathist and foreign Islamist terror. Car bombings, which all but stopped during the Marines' April siege of the city, have returned with a vengeance, and Fallujah appears to be an operational hub for kidnappers as well. Lt. Gen. Mohammed Latif is a local and commander of the so-called Fallujah Brigade, and his heart appears to be in right place: "When coalition forces arrived in Iraq, 99% of the people were happy to see them." But he obviously has little control over the situation in the city, and his "strategy" seems little more than a hope that the various factions of bad guys therein will fight each other to a standstill.





A word is also in order about the since-departed Iraq Czar L. Paul Bremer. Conventional wisdom seems all but solidified on the point that his major mistakes were overzealous de-Baathification and disbanding the Iraqi Army. In truth, Iraq's conscript forces disbanded themselves and de-Baathfication has been overwhelmingly popular with at least 80% (the Shiites and Kurds) of Iraqis.
The real problem is that Mr. Bremer behaved as if he were planning a five-year regency, moving slowly on building new Iraqi security forces and brooking no indigenous challenge to his authority. Meeting the Wolfowitz press pool, he spent an unseemly amount of his time badmouthing the "work ethic" of the outgoing Governing Council, two of whose courageous members were assassinated for serving their country. His questionable commitment to the truth--whether it be on the actual state of electricity supplies, or denying any role in the universally condemned raid on Mr. Chalabi's house--also did not go unnoticed among Iraqis.

But despite it all there remains every chance that come January Iraqis will hold the freest elections in recent Middle Eastern history. This is a testament to the character of Iraqis themselves, and to the unsung heroism, judgment and cultural understanding displayed by 99.9% of coalition troops there. "Very little of that has been reported and it's unfair to Americans, whose kids are doing a great job," volunteered Deputy Prime Minister Salih. On the plane ride home, Mr. Wolfowitz added a similar coda: "I've stopped pretending that I come out to raise their [the troops'] morale because inevitably they raise mine."

Mr. Pollock is a senior editorial page writer at The Wall Street Journal.

[Jice Virago]

The only problem is that the current Iraqi government has about as much sovereignty as the Czar's family shortly after Stalin took over. No one in the region is going to take them seriously and they are not going to be able to function independently for years.

Irony is that we tried this sort of thing before, with the Shaw of Iran and we all know how well that went.....

[Xzion]

Out of curiosity, what do you define as "free", as in a "free iraq"?

[Kelshara]

Two weeks ago I returned to Iraq with Paul Wolfowitz

I stopped reading there. Anyone who stays within 4 feet of Wolfowitz for more than 5 seconds need a shrink.

[Karae]

Half-Full in Iraq
As sovereignty returns, there's cause for optimism.

hahahahahahaha. Sovereignty returns? My ass. The United States military still controls Iraq.

With this uninformed, biased, and blatantly incorrect sentence the author sets the stage for an article that does not deviate one iota from that theme.

[Midnyte_Ragebringer]

BLAH BLAH NEGATIVE BITTERNESS BLAH BLAH

[Kelshara]

Blah blah naive ignorance blah blah

[Niffoni]

While I'm sure the anti-Bush-no-matter-what crackpots would discredit the source if God himself came down and told them everything was gonna work out, I have to agree that anyone who hangs out with Wolfowitz instantly gets dinged on my credibility checklist. ;p

I recommend we all read half the article and feel a little better about Iraq, and then spend the remainder of the time making fun of the name "Pollock".

[Truant]

Pollock is a good name.

[Adex_Xeda]

Heh, you do have to wonder about the writer. He's best chums with Challibi?

[Voronwë]

i think it is not absurd to be cautiously optimistic about Iraq.

to call the situoation "sovereignty" is misleading. a sovereign nation controls the use of force within its boundaries. The current Iraqi government does not have complete authority to spend money or use military power. that pretty much says it all right there.

the current government may well be a required stepping stone toward the end of a "Sovereign" Iraq, but the real reason the US has called it a transfer of sovereignty is so that they can deflect political criticism for things that may go wrong.

"well its not our fault, Iraq is a sovereign nation now".

basically in the words of Ehud Barak "choose the size of your embarrassment". which doesnt necessarily mean 'surrender', and in this instance it may be well played politics. we'll see.