[Mb-civic] What's Going Right in Iraq LATimes

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-iraq24oct24.story

What's Going Right in Iraq
 Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His collection of
essays, "Love, Poverty and War," will be published next month. Michael
Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Insti

 October 24, 2004

 Last week, the Onion offered a satirical story with a Baghdad dateline:
"After 19 months of struggle in Iraq, U.S. military officials conceded a
loss to Iraqi insurgents Monday, but said America can be proud of finishing
'a very strong second.' "

 Not even Michael Moore would suggest that's about to happen.

 Yet the reportage from Iraq is almost as bleak. Even as some media gurus
accuse journalists of naively accepting officials' positive spin on the war,
the sweep of coverage suggests that Iraq's occupiers have turned
post-invasion chaos into a hellish nightmare and perhaps a quagmire ‹ and
the consensus is that matters will only grow worse.

 From the beginning, of course, there has been a counterpoint from those who
are encouraged by what they see ‹ often expressed via the Internet. "As I
head off to Baghdad for the final weeks of my stay in Iraq, I wanted to say
thanks to all of you who did not believe the media," Ray Reynolds, an Iowa
Army National Guard medic, wrote in an e-mail forwarded to the Los Angeles
Times. "They have done a very poor job of covering everything that has
happened." His e-mail cited a litany of positive changes in Iraq since the
invasion, from increased immunizations and educational opportunities for
children ‹ including, notably, girls ‹ to reopened hospitals, ports and
improved delivery of drinking water and telephone service.

 At least a few less-intimately involved observers also glimpse hope amid
the televised images of 24-hour carnage, among them Christopher Hitchens,
Michael Rubin, Frederick W. Kagan and Gary Schmitt.



Hitchens

 It was a heartening story last weekend, about the huge generator being
installed, piece by gigantic piece, in Baghdad. When it comes on stream in a
few months, there will supposedly be more than enough energy to power all
the new gadgets that liberated Baghdadis have been plugging in.

 No, it wasn't a heartening story, either. Where was this generator when it
was needed, about 18 months ago? Who was supposed to be in charge of seeing
to that then, and why has he or she not been summarily fired?

 Much of the good news from Iraq has been qualified or worse by a downside
of this kind. Thus, if they hear a bang in the night, the people of Iraqi
Kurdistan can now turn over and go back to sleep: It won't be the death
squads of Saddam Hussein anymore. But this new security has given some the
opportunity to decide they want to quit what they regard as the failed state
that has replaced the regime.

 On the other hand, there are some unambiguous gains. The Marsh Arabs,
former inhabitants of the largest wetlands in the region and victims of an
ecocidal assault, have seen their ancient habitat partly re-flooded.
Politics has returned to the Iraqi Shiite discourse, which now has a
reciprocal influence on the important debate within neighboring Iran. Iraq
has been verifiably disarmed (not quite the same as taking Hussein's or Hans
Blix's word for it) and the socially devastating epoch of
Hussein-plus-sanctions (vamped on by the U.N. in its disgraceful Oil for
Blood program) is over.

 Democratic voices are being raised insistently, in Syria and Lebanon and
Saudi Arabia, and though you may say this would have happened anyway, there
is no doubt of what ignited the current debate.

 Most important is the military traction that is being gained. One Welsh
regiment of the British army recently killed more than 300 Mahdi army thugs
for the loss of three soldiers: odds too painful for the boastful jihadists
to take. A dangerous Osama bin Laden emulator, Abu Musab Zarqawi, imported
to Iraq before the intervention, will very soon be destroyed along with his
foreign infiltrators.

 The U.S. armed forces are learning every day how to fight in extreme
conditions, in post-rogue-state and post-failed-state surroundings, with the
forces of medieval tyranny. Does anyone think this is not experience worth
having, or that it will not be needed again? And does anyone want to imagine
what Iraq would have looked like now if we had let it go on the way it was
before? Too late and too little, to be sure, but nonetheless one of the
noblest responsibilities we have ever shouldered.

Rubin

As a visiting professor in Iraqi Kurdistan four years ago, I found that
there were three words my University of Baghdad-trained interpreters could
not translate: Debate, tolerance and compromise. The concepts did not exist
in Hussein's Iraq. When I returned to Iraq in the aftermath of war, society
was changing.

 I watched city council meetings in places such as Kirkuk. Kurds, Arabs and
Turkmens compromised on issues that spanned the languages taught in public
schools to affirmative action within the police force. In the southern city
of Nasiriya, taxi drivers, religious students and engineers debated the
merits of federalism.

 Dire predictions of civil war between ethnic and sectarian groups did not
materialize, despite terrorist bombings against Shiite processions,
Christian churches and Kurdish celebrations.

 Iraqis complain about security but are positive about the future. They
reflect optimism not only in polls but also in actions. The new Iraqi
currency, issued on Oct. 15, 2003, at 2,000 Iraqi dinars to the dollar, is
free of Hussein's image. It is also free-floating, and even at the height of
the April uprising and the battle for Najaf, it remained stable, trading
between 1,400 and 1,500 dinars to the dollar. If Iraq is in trouble, don't
tell the Canadians: The dinar regularly outperforms the Canadian dollar on
international markets.

 Iraqis also express confidence with investment, which spans the country.
Electricity is unreliable, so restaurateurs have invested as much as $50,000
for top-model generators. A new clothing boutique represents a $200,000
investment. There are new hotels in Najaf and Karbala. Cigarette venders
have traded pushcarts for tobacco shops. Kurdish investors are constructing
a cancer treatment center in Erbil. In the slums of Sadr City, houses cost
$45,000, nearly double their prewar value. In the swankier district of
Mansur, new houses sell for more than 10 times that amount.

 No Iraqi would invest his or her life savings if they feared civil war or
perpetual lawlessness.

 Freedom matters. Before the war, only the top 3,000 Hussein loyalists could
access the Internet. Today, more than 100,000 households have dial-up
connections. This number does not reflect the thousands of young Iraqi men
who surf the Web (and try to pick up women) at cafes that dot cities, small
towns and villages.

 During Hussein's rule, 1 out of 6 Iraqis fled the country as refugees. Not
only has there not been a mass exodus since Iraq's liberation, but more than
a million refugees have returned.

 Even at the height of the insurgents' bombing campaign, young men lined up
at recruitment stations, not only for the salary but also to make Iraq a
better place. 

 The television cameras do not lie, but they fail to give full perspective.
The fiercest critics of the situation inside Iraq are those who have never
been there. The coalition has made mistakes, and Iraqis are frequently
frustrated at the pace of change. But they do see light at the end of the
tunnel.

Kagan

 The war in Iraq has produced two significant military achievements, one
strategic, the other operational.

 The strategic success is the end of the Iraq containment policy that
required a large U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia after the 1991 Gulf
War. Significant numbers of U.S. forces were tied down in an increasingly
hostile country. Their effect, moreover, on Hussein's conduct was dubious.
Over the decade, the then-Iraqi leader grew ever more resistant to
international demands that he open his country to weapons inspections. The
current occupation of Iraq is temporary. By contrast, the containment policy
required an endless commitment of forces.

 There's a second big benefit to the end of the containment policy. U.S.
forces stationed in Saudi Arabia were a constant irritant in the Muslim
world, a principal reason why Bin Laden attacked the United States.
Foreigners in Iraq may continue to anger Muslims and Arabs, but their
hostility cannot be compared to the outrage they felt over the large U.S.
presence in the birthplace of Islam.

 Finally, the containment policy was tied to economic sanctions, which
punished ordinary Iraqis, a fact that Hussein exploited for his own
purposes. He constantly told Iraqis that the United States was responsible
for the deaths of their children, for the lack of medicine and other
essential supplies that, as we now know, really stemmed from his
manipulation of the U.N. oil-for-food program.

 It was only a matter of time before international support for the sanctions
would have crumbled and killed the policy, giving Hussein a free hand to
restart his weapons programs.

 The operational good news coming out of Iraq was the destruction of the
Mahdi army that served the rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr. The militia had
effectively occupied the holy cities of Iraq, including the Imam Ali Mosque
in Najaf. The conventional wisdom was that the U.S. military would be unable
to expel the rebels from their redoubts without causing an explosion of
anti-Americanism in the Shiite world. Yet U.S. personnel combined measured
force, diplomatic negotiations and skillful deployments to retake Najaf and
recover the shrines without inflicting any substantial damage on them. There
was no outcry in Iraq or the Muslim world at large, and some Iraqis even
took to the streets to protest Sadr's actions. U.S. and Iraqi forces removed
a threat to the development of a peaceful and democratic Iraq.

Schmitt

What's gone right in Iraq? Start with the obvious: Hussein is gone. Whatever
the problems in Iraq, they pale in comparison with the history of Hussein's
tyranny. Thousands upon thousands were persecuted, tortured and executed.
Neighboring states were under threat and, twice, invaded at the cost of
hundreds of thousands of casualties. Hussein spent massively for his own
pleasure and weapons, while allowing the welfare of Iraq's citizens to
deteriorate. 

 Nor, as the recently released Iraq Survey Group report makes clear, was
Hussein a problem of the past. The sanctions regime was collapsing, and the
former Iraqi president had every reason to expect he would soon be free
again to rebuild his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

 Waiting in the wings were Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, two predators
equally involved in supporting their father's reign of terror, domestically
and internationally. No, as Arizona Sen. John McCain has put it: "The years
of keeping Saddam in a box were coming to a closeŠ. Our choice wasn't
between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and
a graver threat."

 Removing Hussein has had wider implications as well. Since 1998, it was
U.S. policy to change regimes in Iraq. Not fulfilling that goal would have
reduced U.S. credibility in the region. Indeed, one reason terrorism was
rising and the sanctions regime dissolving was because the U.S. was seen by
its enemies as a paper tiger. And, conversely, removing Hussein led Libya's
Moammar Kadafi to get out of the WMD business and to the unraveling of
Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan's global supply chain for nuclear
weapons technology.

 Less obvious, but as important for Iraq's future, is that a clear majority
of Iraqis are choosing democracy. Neither Kurds nor Shiites have opted for
more radical alternatives. Kurds have remained committed to a federal state,
and the Shiite public and clerical elite have repeatedly rejected attempts
to push Iraq toward an Islamic regime on the lines of Iran. When given the
chance to vote for local governing councils, Iraqis have regularly voted for
younger and more secular candidates.

 Often overlooked is that Iraqis have been busy learning the art of
self-governance through hundreds of local, city and regional councils. Has
it all gone smoothly? No. But real progress has been made.

 Iraq is never going to be a "Jeffersonian democracy." (For that matter, the
U.S. isn't either.) But polls show that Iraqis are optimistic about
democracy. If we can help provide them with security ‹ and defeat the
insurgents ‹ Iraq has a good chance of creating a decent, representative
government that takes its responsibilities at home and abroad seriously.


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