Life is better, but military gains haven't led to political change.
By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN, Times Senior Correspondent
If you don't look too far or delve too deep, Iraq finally seems to be turning a corner.
Even critics are impressed by the success of the "surge," President Bush's much-maligned effort to improve security by sending in 20,000 extra troops. Violence is at its lowest level in almost 2-1/2 years. Al-Qaida in Iraq is a weakened foe.
"Having U.S. soldiers on the streets of Baghdad has made a definite difference," says Safa Alkateb, an Iraqi-American businessman with in-laws in the capital. "My relatives tell me that they feel and see that the American soldiers are actually more concerned about stability than the Iraqi police and army are sometimes."
And therein lies one of the reasons Iraq is still a very troubled country with a very uncertain future.
Iraqi soldiers -- who have replaced U.S. troops as al-Qaida's main target -- are deserting at a rate of 2,000 a week. Thousands of Iraqi police have been fired for corruption, criminal records or ties to often violent Shiite or Sunni militias.
Nor do the problems stop with Iraq's security forces. In his speech in January, Bush said a major goal of the surge was to make Baghdad safe enough that Iraq's elected officials could resolve the tough political issues dividing the country.
"America," Bush said, "will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced" -- among them, assuming responsibility for security in all 18 provinces by November and passing an oil law to fairly distribute Iraq's oil wealth.
Now, almost a year later, Iraq still has no oil law and nine provinces remain under coalition control. Instead of finishing 2007 with a flurry of legislation, dozens of members of Parliament took off most of December to attend the hajj in Saudi Arabia.
"The political parties, they are not independent, they are running the country with other agendas," says Dr. Katrin Michael, an Iraqi Chaldean Christian. "The Shiite clerics are 100 percent loyal to Iran. There are other groups who are loyal to Saudi Arabia and Syria and Jordan. The Kurds don't have any neighbor countries with which they are friendly, but they have their own agenda.
"The political parties are leading Iraq the wrong way."
War and consequences
In 1987, Michael, then a member of the Kurdish opposition, lost most of her hair and was nearly blinded in a chemical gas attack, one of countless victims of Saddam Hussein's genocidal campaign against the non-Arab Kurds. Last year Michael testified at Hussein's trial, hoping his execution would end a war she supported at first.
Before the 2003 invasion, "Iraq was a small prison. People were dying because of stress, because of embargo, because of the regime. This regime was a danger not only to Iraq but all the area. The war itself was a right step, but the consequences of war became very bad."
Like many Iraqis, Michael blames much of today's instability on mistakes made by the United States early in the occupation. Among them: pushing Iraqis to quickly adopt a new constitution even though it made Islam the official religion and "the source" of all legislation.
"That means we should wait for what the clerics say?" Michael asks. "Religion should be kept away from the state, instead we are becoming an Iranian state."
Nowhere is the flourishing of Islamic fundamentalism more apparent than in what is being touted, paradoxically, as some of the good news in Iraq this year -- British troops turning over security control of southern Basra province to the Iraqis on Dec. 16.
It was an elaborate ceremony, in which Maj. Gen. Graham Binns claimed the province had "begun to regain its strength."
But even the police chief says Basra -- Iraq's main port and second-largest city -- is a lawless nightmare dominated by Shiite militias that are better armed than the security forces. Islamic radicals have killed or chased out most of the city's Christians. And in the past three months, more than 40 women have been murdered for such "un-Islamic" behavior as not covering their hair.
"Basra is an awful mess," says Toby Dodge, an expert on Iraq at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies. "British government claims that Basra is a success are clearly mendacious at least."
Life is better
Violence in Iraq peaked last summer with an average of almost 178 attacks a day. That's when one of Alkateb's sisters-in-law moved to Britain. Another had already fled to Syria, joining 2.2-million other Iraqis who have sought refuge in nearby countries. A third sister-in-law, who couldn't afford to leave, watched as thugs burned her house.
Life today is unquestionably better in Baghdad and western Iraq, where al-Qaida's tactics proved so gruesome and disruptive that even some of their fellow Sunni insurgents decided to cooperate with U.S. troops. Money helped: Some Sunnis are reportedly being paid $300 or more a month, hefty sums in a country with a per capita income of $160 a month and 33 percent unemployment.
"I think people are cautiously optimistic that things can get better, but it's not absolute safety where you go out whenever you want to," Alkateb says.
With pipeline sabotage dramatically reduced, Iraq's oil exports are back to pre-war levels, but rampant corruption means too little of the oil revenues are benefiting ordinary Iraqis. Even in Baghdad, residents have less than nine hours of power a day, much of it from generators. While Alkateb's nieces and nephews attend public schools, many parents feel safer sending their kids to the private schools that are springing up.
"It's a new trend in Baghdad, but the unfortunate part is that they tend toward sectarian lines," Alkateb says.
The relative calm of recent months is due in part to a truce called in August by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr, whose supporters have battled coalition troops in central and southern Iraq. Given Al-Sadr's strident anti-Americanism, the United States is supporting a rival Shiite cleric, Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, even though he is equally fundamentalist and has close ties to Iran.
It's a strategy that might produce good short-term results but could ultimately backfire, a problem also inherent in the new Sunni-U.S. cooperation in western Iraq.
"What you're doing is empowering local powers that in the end will turn against the state," says Dodge, the British expert. Instead, "you should try to integrate those back into the government if the Americans want to go home some day."
That day looks increasingly far off. The success of the surge has muted criticism of the war in the U.S. presidential race and candidates of both parties, including Democratic frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, are under pressure to give the military gains time to translate into political ones.
"My best estimate from what both Hillary and Obama have said is that they'll try to run with existing policy and then have to do something dramatic to try to get re-elected," Dodge says.
Iraqis have their own elections coming up again in 2009, and they are apt to be more discerning in their choices than they were two years ago when they voted almost exclusively along tribal lines. Recent polls show that only 50 percent of Iraqis think their current leaders are willing to make the compromises needed for peace and security.
That recourse to the ballot box could be the main reason Iraq eventually straightens out.
"For hundreds of years the people of Iraq didn't get to decide who should lead the country," Alkateb says. "They're not necessarily happy with the political figures, but they love the fact they can choose them. They see that as the key to the future, the thing that will actually get things going. If you take that away, they have nothing."
