Iraq: As violence ebbs, is reconciliation possible?

"Baghdad has undergone a remarkable transformation,” said Liz Sly in the Chicago Tribune. Just a few months ago, the city was a chaotic war zone, with scores of sectarian killings and suicide bombings driving the populace indoors or to safe havens outside Iraq. But the “surge” of 30,000 additional U.S. troops, along with new counterinsurgency tactics instituted by Gen. David Petraeus, has greatly reduced the daily carnage. Now, for the first time in years, ordinary life has taken hold. Shops and outdoor markets have reopened, children play in parks, and streets are filled with people going about their business. Streetlights have gone on for the first time in years. “I stay open till 9 or 9:30,” said one merchant, Jawad al-Sufi. “Then I walk home and feel completely safe.” Since June, attacks nationwide have dropped 55 percent, with a 60 percent decrease in Iraqi civilian casualties. “Al Qaida has been defeated completely,” said Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf. “They’re shifting their operations outside Iraq.”

“The surge is only a part of this story,” said Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com. Sunni insurgents in Anbar province have finally realized that their alliance with the bloodthirsty thugs of al Qaida was “a horrific mistake,” leaving Iraqi civilians exposed “to the most sadistic and degraded element in the entire Muslim world.” Working closely with U.S. troops, the Sunnis have driven al Qaida out of their safe havens. Both the Sunnis and Shiites are sick of death, and have pulled back from the civil war that filled their neighborhoods with mutilated bodies. “Bin Ladenism in Iraq has been dealt a stinging defeat.” The surge wasn’t just a military success, said Ralph Peters in the New York Post. It had a huge “psychological effect” in Iraq, where insurgents and al Qaida terrorists had concluded that the Americans were about to give up. When new troops poured in, they were stunned and disheartened, and ordinary Iraqis gained the confidence “to flip to our side.”

The relative peace Iraqis are now enjoying, however, may not last, said Thomas Ricks in The Washington Post. The surge was designed to give Iraq enough breathing room “to arrive at new power-sharing arrangements.” But despite the ebbing of violence, the Iraqi government has made no significant progress toward healing the country’s divisions. Iraq’s Shiite majority is nervous about the growing power of the Sunnis’ self-defense militias, which number 70,000 heavily armed men. So the Shiite-dominated government is refusing to give the Sunnis an equitable share of political power or Iraq’s oil resources. If Sunnis aren’t brought into the tent within six months, military leaders warn, they could turn back to “the dark side,” and an even more violent civil war could erupt. “It’s unclear how long the window is going to be open,” said Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, who commands day-to-day U.S. operations.

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But even if you assume the best, said Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post, Iraq will not be a stable, functioning democracy for many years. Consider, meanwhile, what this war has done to America’s reputation. Four years of embarrassing U.S. incompetence has disillusioned our allies, invigorated anti-Americanism, and reduced our influence in the Middle East, Asia, and the rest of the world. Because of our doomsday warnings about Iraq’s WMD, nothing we can say about Iran’s nuclear program has any credibility—“even if Iranian nukes were on display in downtown Tehran.” Someday, perhaps, Iraq will become the nation President Bush dreamed about when he launched the invasion in 2003. But “however it all comes out, the price we’ve paid is too high.”