Barking at shovels

Iraq: two months later

Well, two months ago they were ripping down that statue in Baghdad. How are things going? On the whole, not too bad, it seems. Mark Steyn is in a jolly see-no-evil kind of mood, but he's been touring the country and it seems at least one of my criteria from April is satisfied: it's reasonably safe to drive the roads.

So that's the most basic thing about post-Saddam Iraq: for all the "anarchy", no one's fleeing. In the course of my trip, I drove as far east as the outskirts of Baghdad and as far north as Kirkuk. I spent a pleasant evening prowling round Saddam's home town of Tikrit, where I detected a frisson of menace in the air, but marginally less than in, say, Stockwell, south London. [+]

The rest of his article (hell, even that bit I quoted) is a bit short on detail and long on self-satisfied political point-scoring for me to really take it seriously as reporting, but as a statement of the optimists' case, it'll do. On a more localized basis, we also have stabilization coming slowly (but coming) to Baghdad:

After six weeks of patrols in his area, Colonel Grimsley said the level of violent crime was lower than in Atlanta, the nearest big city to the brigade's base in Georgia. Shops and cafes have reopened. Vendors have appeared again on sidewalks, selling cigarettes and sodas. Traffic, even traffic jams, have returned.

"When this bicycle shop opened about a week after we got here, I knew we were going to be O.K.," Colonel Grimsley said as he rode in an armored Humvee through Adhamiya, the neighborhood where Mr. Hussein is reported to have made his last known public appearance, on April 9, just as Baghdad was about to fall.

But the situation is still unstable. On June 1, a firefight erupted at the Abu Hanifa Mosque only a few hundred yards from the bicycle shop. A grenade was thrown from a car toward soldiers guarding a checkpoint. Snipers opened fire from at least one building nearby. Two soldiers from the First Armored Division were wounded. An Iraqi civilian died. [+]

And there's this report from Anthony Shadid (Wash Post) on Karbala, where apparently the Marine colonel in charge has established good working relations with the locals.

But the protest Monday was perhaps most remarkable for what was missing. Not once was there a chant denouncing the U.S. occupation, a staple of demonstrations elsewhere in Iraq. A request by U.S. troops for the crowd to make way for military vehicles prompted protesters to shout: "Get back! Get back!" The crowd hurriedly did.

In a city so sacred that its soil is used to make the stones on which Shiites bow their heads in prayer, the American occupation of Karbala -- 1,110 U.S. troops in a city of 500,000 -- has emerged as a rare example of a postwar experience gone right.

In gestures large and small -- from reopening an amusement park with free admission to restoring electricity to twice its prewar level, from stopping looting with a rapidly reconstituted police force, to a conscious effort to respect religious sensitivities -- Karbala seems to have avoided the bitterness and disenchantment that has enveloped Baghdad and other cities.
....

Unlike towns in restive regions north and west of Baghdad, U.S. troops in Karbala have yet to come under fire. They have entered fewer than 10 houses here to search for weapons. They patrol without flak jackets in an effort to make their presence less formidable. They try to stay at least 100 yards from the city's two shrines -- one housing the remains of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the prophet Muhammad whose death in battle in 680 defines the spiritual narrative of Shiite belief, the other the remains of his half-brother Abbas, celebrated as a symbol of Arab heroism. [+]

That last bit, though, about US troops coming under fire, is where the pessimists' case starts up. So far, 50 US troops have been killed since the end of April -- about one a day -- conducting the occupation, while 138 were killed during the war proper. Rockets are being fired at troops, at least one woman has made a suicide grenade attack, and patrols have been attacked by snipers. The Third Infantry Division has had their orders to return home cancelled, and morale is dropping fast (why was "supporting the troops by staying the hell out of a war" such a hard concept to understand, anyway?). As Bruce Rolston observes,

The 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division has now been in Iraq for nine months (the rest of the division a little less). Canadians have generally concluded that peacekeepers start losing their edge after six. Just noting. [+]

"Losing their edge" means things like this:

"I think that was the most scary thing trusting civilians, especially after the car bomb," Sergeant Betancourt, 21, said, referring to the taxi bombing, the worst single attack against the brigade's troops, on March 29, near Najaf, about 85 miles south of Baghdad. "We didn't want nothing to do with these people anymore."

As he stood guard at a hospital, as he enforced curfew at checkpoints, as he patrolled streets once again bustling with Iraqis, even the children terrified Sergeant Betancourt, who appears barely older than a child himself.

"At the end," he said, "it was like, `Get that kid away from me.' " [+]

The Pentagon appears to be having difficulty coming up with enough troops to occupy the country properly, which at least means we shouldn't be seeing any more serious sabre-rattling elsewhere (Iran can relax) until they're extracted.

The reason all of this military overstretch and death-of-a-thousand-cuts stuff matters is summed up by Salam Pax as well as anyone:

A convoy goes thru the village and gets attacked, RPGs or Kalashnikovs are fired. It is night and the visibility is pretty low, as a retaliation and self-defence you have the convoy shooting left and right down the road for the next couple of kilometers (that if if they didn't decide to stop and go into attack-mode - see what happened in Hir).

Now when you go ask the people in the village, district or neighborhood about the attacks they tell you the attackers were strangers, not from the area. Think of it for a moment. If I wanted to instigate anti-american sentiments in a neighborhood which was until now indifferent towards the Americans what would be the best thing to do?

I would find a way to get the Americans to do bad things in that neighborhood, for example shoot indiscriminately at houses and shops

Sabaa Khalifa Makhmoud, 26, had finished cleaning his blue and white bus on the opposite side of the road from the American convoy and had just stepped out of the vehicle when the soldiers began shooting in response to the attack. One of his daughters, a toddler, was outside with him, and he scooped her up and ran inside their house. The shooting blasted out two windows in his bus and left a ragged hole in one of the bus curtains.

make them go on house to house searches, tie up the men and put sacks on their heads and scare all the children.

this would tilt your American-o-meter from the "I-don't-really-care" position to the "what-the-fuck-do-they-think-they-are-doing?" position.

So, how are things going in Iraq? Well enough for the moment, it seems. Let's hope things stay that way.

Thanks to Daniel Drezner and Jim Henley for links.

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