The New York Times has an encouraging front-page piece today about many families in Iraq finding that they can exhale for the first time in quite a while, thanks to modest improvements to security. The piece noted one Shiite librarian in southern Baghdad who is “one of many Iraqis who in recent weeks have begun to test where they can go and what they can do when fear no longer controls their every move.”
The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says.
As a result, for the first time in nearly two years, people are moving with freedom around much of this city. In more than 50 interviews across Baghdad, it became clear that while there were still no-go zones, more Iraqis now drive between Sunni and Shiite areas for work, shopping or school, a few even after dark. In the most stable neighborhoods of Baghdad, some secular women are also dressing as they wish. Wedding bands are playing in public again, and at a handful of once shuttered liquor stores customers now line up outside in a collective rebuke to religious vigilantes from the Shiite Mahdi Army.
Iraqis are clearly surprised and relieved to see commerce and movement finally increase, five months after an extra 30,000 American troops arrived in the country. But the depth and sustainability of the changes remain open to question.
It all sounds quite heartening. Iraqis still won’t return to homes they fled due to sectarian violence, but in some areas, there are signs of normalcy. Baghdad is still a patchwork of Sunni and Shiite enclaves, and Iraqi security forces are not mixed with Sunnis and Shiites together, but the bloodshed is not as horrific as it was.
I was talking to a reader the other day who suggested that we might be able to tolerate security progress without political progress. His argument was, in effect, that reconciliation would be nice, but perhaps unnecessary — modest stability in a post-ethnic-cleansing Iraq might be good enough to label the status quo a “success.”
That might sound compelling, but it doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny.
The AP’s Robert Reid tackled this very subject yesterday.
The drop in bombings and killings in Baghdad is a welcome change from years of slaughter. But U.S. commanders and many Iraqis fear the relative quiet won’t last without substantial political agreements among the country’s sectarian leaders.
The fear: Sunni and Shiite extremist groups responsible for the carnage are still around — bloodied but not destroyed. And many of the key power-sharing issues that fueled the conflict remain unresolved.
Without agreements to resolve them, the conflict could flare up again, as it did after previous lulls. And some of the measures that have helped ease the violence could backfire, triggering new bloodshed.
“The aim of this military operation was to find a period of time to achieve reconciliation among Iraqis,” said Dr. Saad al-Hadithi, a political science professor at Baghdad University. “But if the government is hesitant and lacks confidence, then this lull will not last for long.”
I know it starts to sound repetitious, but every time a war supporter points to a modest drop in violence as evidence of the “surge’s” success, I wonder if they’re forgetful or intentionally missing the point — the surge’s principal goal was to pave the way for political reconciliation. Over the last year, there’s been no political progress at all — in fact, it’s gone backwards. Policies that fail to achieve their goals are not success stories.
In Iraq’s case, violence in late 2007 is now better than it was in early 2007, and that’s certainly encouraging. But the administration established specific, worthwhile goals for his surge policy, and we’ve come up short, across the board. Worse, there’s no evidence to suggest that we will reach those goals anytime soon.
And with the surge about to end, involuntarily, and the administration unable to make any political strides, Iraq’s future is uncertain, at best. The sooner we prepare to withdraw, the sooner Iraqis will feel the pressure to reconcile.