On the Right Side
By Fred Hiatt
washingtonpost.com
Monday, November 3, 2003; Page A19
BAGHDAD -- Before flying here, new recruits to the occupation staff get briefed by an American colonel in Kuwait City: "You are going to be helping to rebuild a nation. I can't think of anything more honorable than that," he tells them. "We won the war, and we're going to win the peace, regardless of anything you may see in the news media."
The effort is impressive, from the vast staging city of air-conditioned tents in the Kuwaiti desert to the Army Corps of Engineers patching oil wells in the north. Impressive too are the dedication and courage of tens of thousands far from home: the consultant who left her comfortable Washington job to sleep on a cot in Saddam Hussein's palace and help coordinate relations between the provisional government and the paymasters back in the District; the 21-year-old tank driver, who had never heard of Ramadan or Baghdad but now finds himself stolidly guarding a police station in one of the city's toughest slums; the British officers shaping a new Iraqi army, the Danish mass-grave experts helping to document Saddam Hussein's crimes, the Iraqi exile professors and businessmen back to pitch in where they can.
And are they winning the peace? A short answer: More than you might think, less than you might have hoped. Daily life in much of the country is back to something like normal. In Shiite towns south of Baghdad, people bustle through crowded markets to buy dates and pomegranates with nary an American soldier in sight. Traffic in Baghdad is heavy, and used cars from Jordan and Kuwait are flowing into Iraq for resale. Representative councils are at work in neighborhoods, towns and cities, and at the national level Iraqi Cabinet ministers from every ethnic group are shaping their 2004 budgets. Street crime is down, and newly trained Iraqi police are increasingly visible.
But there is in fact no "peace" yet to win, as yesterday's awful events demonstrate. Car bombs and mortar attacks have the capital on edge. Attacks on U.S. forces are frequent and growing in number, and U.S. ignorance of the size and nature of the opposition reflects a continuing and perplexing failure of intelligence. Electricity, oil production, sewerage and other utilities are being steadily restored but also regularly sabotaged. Every Iraqi can recite a litany of costly U.S. mistakes and missed opportunities: The systematic looting that went unchecked, setting reconstruction back months and squandering goodwill. The abrupt dissolution of the army, which thrust thousands of armed men into angry unemployment. The continued isolation of the civilian occupiers, hunkered down in their Baghdad fortress and nearly invisible in much of the rest of Iraq. The damaging shortage of Arabic speakers and translators.
And almost everyone agrees that American troops are wearing out their welcome.
"More and more people want us to go home," Pfc. Rachel Bosveld, 19, wrote to her family shortly before she became, last weekend, the fourth female soldier to die in Iraq. "Believe me, we want to go home."
So the Americans find themselves in a race to improve security, train Iraqi forces and start a constitutional process before the manifestations of occupation become intolerable to a preponderance of Iraqis. And yet politically the hard part lies ahead: the birthing of the first representative government ever in an ethnically fractured nation surrounded by neighbors hostile to the enterprise.
Given the challenge, the skepticism back in Washington is understandable. But from here much of the Washington debate sounds oddly beside the point. Last week, for example, Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller, speaking with a kind of I-told-you-so weariness, responded to an attack on U.S. headquarters in Baghdad by saying America may be fighting the wrong war.
That may be true; years from now we may shake our heads at the hubris or naivete of that colonel in Kuwait. Yet it seems, at a minimum, awfully early for such a conclusion. From here one would wish that the debate back home would focus a bit more on how to make the venture succeed rather than on why it was a mistake and bound to fail.
For whether or not you believe this was the wrong war, it is clear that America is on the right side. Failure would delight not only the Saddam Hussein henchmen and al Qaeda terrorists battling American troops but also the ayatollahs of Iran, the wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, the secret police of Syria. And the losers would be many -- among them the people of Iraq, most of whom want nothing more than to be part of a peaceful, free and stable nation.
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