Sunday, September 28, 2008
Opinion

Iraq’s amazing recovery

Ever wonder whatever happened to Iraq? No one talks about it...

By Stephanie Ramage

Ever wonder whatever happened to Iraq? No one talks about it, but things are going surprisingly well in Iraq, thank you very much. But don’t take my word for it. Take the word of a newspaper that many conservatives call “a bastion of liberalism”—the New York Times.

On Sunday, Sept. 21, on the front page of the “Week in Review” section, beginning with a plain, gray column of un-illustrated text next to a full-color treatment of the economic crisis, was a positively splendid piece titled “Back in Iraq, Jarred by the Calm,” by award-winning journalist Dexter Filkins.

For some of us, Iraq’s growing calm is old news, but it would certainly seem to come as a shock to a lot of people, and it is likely to be completely ignored by those who have staked their careers on American failure in Iraq, like columnist Arianna Huffington. These people “know” that America’s involvement in Iraq has hopelessly destroyed that country as surely as some people “know” that saints and angels regularly sit at their bedsides and give them auto-repair advice. The facts have about the same impact in both cases.

Filkins, author of the new book “The Forever War,” has reported from Iraq for the Times since 2004. After taking some time off in 2006 and 2007 to fulfill a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, he returned to Baghdad late this summer and was stunned by what he found.

“On Karada Mariam, a street that runs over the Tigris River toward the Green Zone, the Serwan and the Zamboor, two kebab places blown up by suicide bombers in 2006, were crammed with customers,” Filkins writes. “Farther up the street was Pizza Napoli, the Italian place shut down in 2006; it, too, was open for business. And I’d forgotten altogether about Abu Nashwan’s Wine Shop, boarded up when the black-suited militiamen of the Mahdi Army had threatened to kill its owners. There it was, flung open to the world.

 “Abu Nawas Park — I didn’t recognize that, either. By the time I had left the country in August 2006, the two-mile stretch of Riverside Park was a grim, spooky, deserted place, a symbol for the dying city that Baghdad had become. These days, the same park is filled with people: families with children, women in jeans, women walking alone. Even the nighttime, when Iraqis used to cower inside their homes, no longer scares them. I can hear their laughter wafting from the park. At sundown the other day, I had to weave my way through perhaps 2,000 people. It was an astonishing, beautiful scene—impossible, incomprehensible, only months ago.”

Filkins cites a drop in violence of as much as 90 percent. He concedes that the calm may be temporary, and that it is fragile, but it is also undeniable. He attributes much of it, rightly, to the Iraqi government’s resolve to take responsibility for its country. He doesn’t hide some of the drawbacks, like how the electricity is on for only part of the day in some neighborhoods, but he also doesn’t hide the American role in the country’s newfound stability, pointing out the effectiveness of the Anbar Awakening, as well as relating one 68-year-old Shiite woman’s perception of American soldiers. Sadiya Salman’s sons, Filkins writes, had fled persecution by Sunni gangs, but have recently returned: “In the 24 months that her sons were gone, Ms. Salman said she rarely ventured outside. The exception, she said, was when she saw American soldiers. ‘Oh, I love them,’ Ms. Salman said, brightening in her darkened house. ‘I always knew I was safe with them.’”
I hope those words made you—whatever your political affiliation may be—as proud as they made me. SP

Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.