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The Surge Worked–First Obama and Now the NY Times Admits It
Recently, Barack Obama was forced to admit that the surge worked beyond his wildest dreams.
Now it’s the New York Times turn. NYT reporter Dexter Filkins ventured back to Iraq after two years away. He was jarred by the calm.
Filkins paints a vivid picture of a serene city that he could not have imagined just 25 months ago:
When I left Baghdad two years ago, the nation’s social fabric seemed too shredded to ever come together again. The very worst had lost its power to shock. To return now is to be jarred in the oddest way possible: by the normal, by the pleasant, even by hope. The questions are jarring, too. Is it really different now? Is this something like peace or victory? And, if so, for whom: the Americans or the Iraqis?
If this isn’t peace, I don’t know what is:
And now, in the late summer of 2008, comes the calm. Violence has dropped by as much as 90 percent. A handful of the five million Iraqis who fled their homes — one-sixth of all Iraqis — are beginning to return. The mornings, once punctuated by the sounds of exploding bombs, are still . . . .
Standing in the middle of the downtown, I found myself disoriented. I had been here before — I was certain — but still I couldn’t recognize the place. Two summers ago, when I’d last been in Ramadi, the downtown lay in ruins. Only one building stood then, the Anbar provincial government center, and the Americans were holding onto it at all cost. For hundreds of yards in every direction, everything was destroyed; streets, buildings, cars, even the rubble had been ground to dust. Ramadi looked like Dresden, or Grozny, or some other obliterated city. Insurgents attacked every day.
And then, suddenly, I realized it: I was standing in front of the government center itself. It was sporting a fresh concrete facade, which had been painted off-white with brownish trim. Over the entrance hung a giant official seal of Anbar Province. The road where I stood had been recently paved; it was black and smooth. The rubble had been cleared away. American marines were walking about, without helmets or flak jackets or even guns.
In the crowd, I saw a face I recognized. It was Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security advisor. It had been a long time since I’d seen him. Mr. Rubaie is a warm, garrulous man, a neurologist who spent years in London before returning to Iraq. But he is also a Shiite, and a member of Iraq’s Shiite-led government, which, in 2005 and 2006, was accused of carrying out widespread atrocities against Iraq’s Sunnis. Anbar Province is almost entirely Sunni.
As Mr. Rubaie made his way through the crowd, I noticed he was holding hands with another Iraqi man, a traditional Arab gesture of friendship and trust. It was Brig. Gen. Murdi Moshhen al-Dulaimi, the Iraqi Army officer taking control of the province — a Sunni.
Sunni and Shia holding hands? Sounds alot like reconciliation.
And who’s to thank? The American soldier, of course.
Sadiya Salman’s four sons and their families, for instance, returned home to Adamiyah recently after two years away. I found them crowded into their small, dimly-lit home in Zhrawaya, Adamiyah’s only Shiite neighborhood.
Like so many other of Baghdad’s mixed neighborhoods, Zhrawaya was the scene of terrifying sectarian violence in 2006 and 2007. As Shiites in predominantly Sunni Adamiyah, the Salman brothers — Wajdi, Luay, Rushdi and Feraz — considered themselves likely targets.
Then came the men in black masks one day, who spray-painted a warning on the wall: “Rafida,” Arabic for “rejectionist.” It is a derogatory word that some militant Sunnis use for Shiites.
And so the brothers left, taking their wives and children with them, 13 in all. Ms. Salman, an intense and energetic woman of 68 years, stayed behind with her four daughters; as a female, she felt safe.
. . . 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.”
With life returning to normal in Adamiyah, the Salman brothers and their families recently returned . . . .
Filkins asked a strange question at the outset: If this is peace or victory, is it for the Iraqis or the Americans? Based on his report, I’d say both.
God bless the American military and the courageous people of Iraq.