The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship?

Najaf

"Iraq's chaos gives intervention a bad name," reads the International Herald Tribune headline above a Nicholas Kristof column. Traveling through Iraq in mid to late June, the New York Times writer found "looters" and "bandits" but, alas, no weapons of mass destruction. Trying to keep some Wilsonian idealism afloat, he feared the Bush administration's "mistakes and poor planning" were "miring America in Iraq . . . [and would] unfairly discredit humanitarian intervention" elsewhere. One old Middle East hand sees an Iraqi population increasingly "emasculated" and "patronized" by American power. The United States--under President George W. Bush, especially adolescent and hubristic--is thus rubbing raw an ancient people and culture, with its ill-managed and ill-planned democratic nation-building. Three months after the war's end the Economist, too, finds Iraq frightfully messy. Baghdad is "a city in thrall to fear and violent crime," the British weekly informs us. Indeed, in the entire country "none feels safe."

With rare exceptions, Western newspapers, magazines, TV news, and radio uniformly tell the story of increasingly effective guerrilla movements, random violence, theft, rape, rising religious extremism, Shiite clerical dissatisfaction, Sunni Arab bitterness, antidemocratic tribalism and nationalism, angry and despairing U.S. soldiers, and even more distressed congressmen and anonymous U.S. officials. Poor American administration of the country, per this reporting--as always, most trenchantly expressed by the BBC--is producing an ill-tempered, ever more anti-American Iraqi population whose thankfulness for the destruction of Saddam Hussein's rule is probably ending.

Indeed, in the opinion of CNN's Middle East correspondent Ben Wedeman, a "divorce" has already taken place between the Iraqis and the Americans. For those historically inclined, echoes of the 1920 rebellion against the post-World War I British administration of Mesopotamia can already be heard. The Americans may have fought a quick, nearly painless military campaign (though while it was happening, many of these same critics found the war quite rough), but the Bush administration is getting its comeuppance in postwar Iraq, for which it had so skimpily and belatedly planned. Even in pro-war neoconservative, conservative, and liberal circles, it isn't hard to find doom-and-gloom sentiments. Are we really teetering then on the edge of the "Big Mess"?

AS I WALKED the streets of Baghdad at night, which in most districts of the city isn't a particularly dangerous thing to do, as I visited mosques and clerics in the Sunni and Shiite lands to the north and south, I picked up a fairly acute case of cognitive dissonance. Reading too much of the Western press before and especially during a visit to Iraq is mentally unbalancing. Though the problems in Iraq are enormous and the isolation of many U.S. officials in the Jumhuriyah Palace headquarters in Baghdad is surreal, neither the country nor its American administrators appeared to be sliding downhill into chaos. In most of Iraq--in the key areas of the country, in the Shiite south, the Kurdish north, and in Baghdad--just the opposite is happening. Productive energy and commerce are slowly returning to the streets, which is impressive given how long it is taking to rebuild a functioning nationwide telephone system. In mid to late June, U.S. officials--for all their clumsiness, lack of language skills, and enthusiastic ethos of "force protection"--appeared to be drawing closer to the Iraqi population, not farther away. This was especially true in the Shiite regions of Iraq, which are essentially everything from Baghdad south.