Mohamed Hussein, an Iraqi employee of the New York Times who fled to Syria in 2006, has returned to his neighborhood in Baghdad and files a report for the paper's Baghdad Bureau Blog:

I think that the Iraqi police and army are working in the right way because there is an American military center inside my neighborhood. But all the people I met said that if the Americans left, those militias would eat our flesh without mercy....

Will it stay safe or not?

I guess that all depends on the American troops, since we will not have qualified Iraqi forces soon. Although most Iraqi forces are sincere you find some have been infiltrated by groups of gunmen and sectarian people who made the mess all around us.

So we still need the Americans because if they intend to leave, there will be something like a hurricane which will extract everything - people, buildings and even trees. Everything that has happened and all that safety will be past, just like a sweet dream.

As people say in my neighborhood: “The Americans are now Ansar al Sunna.” Protectors of the Sunni.

It's worth reading the whole thing. And it's worth pondering just what a withdrawal would mean for the people of Iraq, even as the Democrats refuse to offer any such speculation. If we are to abandon these people to sectarian violence, terrorism, and warlordism, it will not be enough to simply say that things are bad now, and are just as likely to get worse if we leave as if we stay. Things are better. So wouldn't it be foolish to squander the opportunity presented here--the chance to foster the notion that America is the protector of the Sunni? We're winning the battle for hearts and minds and all anyone on the left can talk about is getting out as soon as possible to leave the Iraqis to their fate. And they claim to make that argument from the moral high-ground.

If McCain said anything like this...how long until the left mocked him as ignorant of the facts on the ground?

HT: Instapundit