"The other Iraq"

The other Iraq
By Victor Davis Hanson
Published February 25, 2006

TAJI, Iraq. -- Screaming Iraqis and mangled body parts still dominate
Americans' nightly two minutes of news from Iraq. Indeed, Iraq within
the Sunni Triangle is still a scary place.
Opposition politicians in the United States charge our troops don't
have enough body protection or heavily armored Humvees -- suggesting
our fighters have been almost criminally ignored. On CNN, a journalist
laments that a prominent news colleague severely wounded near Taji is
emblematic of the mess of the entire American effort.
But Iraq, like all wars, is not static. What was supposedly true on
the ground in Iraq in 2003 is not necessarily so in 2006 -- in the way
that the situation in Europe in 1943 hardly resembled that of May 1945.

Yet while things have changed radically in Iraq, the pessimistic
tone of our reporting remains calcified. Little is written about the
new Iraqi government, the emergence of the Iraqi security forces or the
radically changing role of the American military.
I recently listened to members of the newly elected Iraqi
provincial council in strife-torn Kirkuk. All were enthusiastic about
their new responsibilities. They were unabashedly argumentative with
one another over security, electricity and oil production -- but still
confident they could govern their own affairs. As the meeting broke up,
a female council member whispered, "Tell the Americans thanks, but ask
them to have patience with us."
She's right: Patience, more than anything, is now needed in Iraq.
There are now 10 Iraqi divisions. The newest is the 9th Mechanized
Division, at Taji, of Maj. Gen. Bashar Ayoub, trained under the
auspices of Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey's officers of the Multinational
Security Transition Command.
A Patton-like veteran of three bloody wars, Gen. Bashar Ayoub has
fashioned ex nihilo a new division replete with refurbished Soviet T-72
tanks and scores of veteran officers from the old Iraqi army. He plans
to take over most of the security of Taji, and was out on the streets
with his men even before his division fully materialized.
Two years ago, the conventional wisdom was that we wrongly
disbanded the Iraqi army and dumped shoddy equipment on what little we
rounded up. Soon the new complaint will no doubt emerge that we have
redeployed too many officers from the old corps, and that their
brigades appear too lethal in new uniforms, body armor and mechanized
vehicles.
At the enormous Balad U.S. Air Base -- with almost as much traffic
as at Chicago's O'Hare -- nearly 75 percent of the emergency surgeries
under its vast tents are on Iraqi casualties who receive the same care
as wounded Americans.
Everything there is in constant flux, as Predator drones now
monitor roads, highways and pipelines. U.S. Air Force officers prepare
radar grids to craft a new air traffic control system that someday will
accommodate Iraqi civilian airplanes.
In 2003, Americans saw daily L. Paul Bremer, then head of the
Coalition Provisional Authority, on television. In contrast, few even
know what Zalmay Khalilzad, the current American ambassador to Iraq, or
the top echelon of the U.S. officer corps -- Gens. George Casey, Martin
Dempsey and Peter Chiarelli -- looks like. Reconstruction, Iraqization,
drawdown and diplomatic finesse are the new themes, not telling Iraqis
what to do or building new permanent bases in the desert.
Almost every media stereotype about the American military vanishes
when visiting frontline bases. The world still sees dated Abu Ghraib
photos, not Iraqi civilians receiving topflight care in the
American-run hospital emergency room in Baghdad.
We hear the U.S. Army is worn out -- propped up by national
guardsmen and reserves. Yet young enlistees differ. They claim instead
that more mature reservists are a godsend for reconstruction efforts
since so many back home were successful contractors, businessmen,
teachers and mechanics.
Complaints circulate about the weight, not the dearth, of body and
truck armor. I saw hundreds of Humvees on the roads, but not one was
unarmored. I shot AK-47s with professional Iraqi soldiers and felt far
safer amid their professional live fire than back home at the local
municipal range.
Critics dub our military a "mercenary" force and sometimes call for
renewing the draft. It is hardly a late-imperial Roman legion filled
with foreigners and malcontents but rather a true volunteer force,
whose diversity in age, gender, race and religion would shame a
university faculty or newsroom. Most of the colonels I met are as well
educated as academics, but far more willing to debate and question
their own beliefs.
Saddam Hussein destroyed Iraq -- butchering, traumatizing and
dividing 25 million. His baleful legacy is clear from helicopter rides
over Baghdad sewers or a visit to one of his repugnant palaces where
nonpotable water pours out of gold faucets.
It was nearly impossible to remove Saddam, foster democracy in the
heart of the ancient caliphate and restore in a relatively short time
what took the Saddam's coterie three decades to destroy. Meanwhile, all
this must be done surrounded by Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia in the
midst of a larger war against Islamic fundamentalism and under global
scrutiny from a largely hostile audience.
What amazes is not so much the audacity of even thinking the United
States could attempt such a thing but that it may just pull it off
after all -- if only we remain patient.

Victor Davis Hanson is a nationally syndicated columnist and a
classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford
University, and author of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and
Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."

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