I left Baghdad this morning and am now in Amman.

I skipped town during an odd interlude.  Violence in Baghdad is down, with American and Iraqi troops all over the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city.  Word is the killings are down 30 percent.  That's good news and it's significant.  Whether it's of long-term signficance remains to be seen.  There's a fine line you have to walk with this kind of news.  I'm more than happy to report it, but a lot of people seem to want more than that.  They want analysis saying that this proves things are about to start heading in the right direction.  That's possible.  I'm inclined to be skeptical and that skepticism is based on past experience, not a lack of respect for Iraqis or the United States military.

In January of 2005 I thought the elections were going to be marred by low turnout and violence.  I was wrong about that.  Up in Mosul and Tal Afar with the 25th Infantry and the Stryker guys I saw a very small segment of a huge nation-wide effort to suppress the insurgency ahead of the elections.  From what I saw it was a masterful plan carried out with tremendous competence and energy.  It was a good news story and I was happy to report it.  But while things would undoubtedly be a lot worse right now if the insurgents had wrecked that election, the election alone did not "turn around" the situation in Iraq.  The same over-arching issues that fueled the violence before January 2005 continued to do so after January 2005.

Similarly, after the US military and the Iraqi security forces finish their security sweeps in Baghdad's worst neighborhoods, they will probably not have altered the dynamic of the sectarian conflict in Iraq.  All the commanders readily agree that's the case; what they say they're doing now is getting the violence down to a level where Iraqi forces can assume day-to-day responsibility for security and the government has room to pursue national reconciliation.  So, as I think I wrote a few days ago, the real test of this operation has little to do with short-term drops in violence and everything to do with the Iraqi government, the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi Police.

All that said, I don't sneer at the current success even if it is temporary.  If the latest statistics are accurate the operation is saving lives.  And things seemed a bit more normal on the streets yesterday.  So normal that the traffic is back to its usual snarl.  I was heading to a press conference in the Green Zone yesterday (it was officially a mystery guest; the mytery guest turned out to be the US attorney general).  We didn't take our usual route because traffic was absurd; apparently the fuel shortage has eased and everyone was out trying to buy cheaper gas.  So we took the long way around, through neighborhoods that used to be quiet, ritzy Sunni enclaves but are now pretty dodgy.

Traffic was heavy, people were on the streets, and things seemed about as normal as you could expect.  There were Iraqi soldiers manning checkpoints and looking pretty professional.  I started thinking about what a strange war this is—an insurgency against the US while Sunnis and Shiites wage a double insurgency against each other's civilians, politicians and fighters.  It's a frustrating war to cover (not that I've covered any others) because so much happens beneath the surface.  I was thinking in this vein as we drove through Mansour on a big four-lane parkway.  We drove past an Iraqi military base surrounding by high concrete blast walls, by a mosque with an Iraqi soldier out front protected by sandbags, a free-standing blast barrier and a machine gun.

Further on up the road I heard a few gunshots.  It got my attention, but I assumed it was Iraqi soldiers or police clearing traffic in their usual aggressive fashion by shooting into the air.  But there was another rat-a-tat-tat, and we saw the cars ahead of us driving across the parkway to head in the other direction or turning onto side streets.  There was some discussion in Arabic and the driver said there was fighting up ahead.  He asked if I wanted to go back to the house.  I thought for a second and said, "Let's just drive somewhere you think is safe and we'll figure it out from there."  We turned off onto a side street, looped around and came back up onto the main drag.  By the time we'd done so the right-hand lane of traffic had reversed entirely and was jammed full of cars slowly moving away from the trouble down the road.  In the distance I heard a few thudding rounds from a heavy machine gun.

We merged back into traffic.  There was an Iraqi police truck trying to move towards the fighting, which was tough when hundreds of cars wanted to go in exactly the opposite direction.  Once it was beyond us I heard someone firing very nearby—someone in the truck shooting at the sky to clear traffic.  I told the driver what he already knew—that we should make sure not to barrel ahead too quickly or we might surprise anxious cops or soldiers driving towards us.  But there was no drama; we maneuvered through traffic, crossed over into the right-hand lane, and made it back to the house without a problem.

One thing I won't miss about Iraq is the commute.

I'm going to keep blogging even while I'm out of Iraq.  There'll be plenty to write about.

 

What did you think of this article?

Liked
Disliked
No Opinion