Baghdad Babylon

Hope and Despair in Divided Iraq

Part 3: 'Reason for Hope'

His message will be straightforward. He'll tell Congress he needs more time and he will describe the situation in much the same way he describes it in the interview: "The situation is not satisfactory, but there is reason for hope."

This doesn't sound like much, but in order to even be able to utter this sentence, Petraeus had to send his troops back into battle. He knew from the beginning that he would "not be running against the clock, but against a stopwatch." In January the general deployed his divisions for a last major offensive against the terrorists and racked up high casualties in the process -- 656 American soldiers died between January and July.

Since the offensive began, day after day, night after night, along the length and breadth of the country, US troops have hunted down bombers and rocket-builders. They’ve tracked al-Qaida operatives and members of violent insurgency groups with names like Ansar al-Sunna, Jaish al-Mahdi and the Islamic State of Iraq. The campaign has been moderately successful, too. In January, Petraeus said, "The situation is not satisfactory." That he can now add, "it gives rise to hope" is, indeed, progress.

A Decline in Terror Attacks

In many cities and villages in Iraq’s 18 provinces, terrorist networks are either weaker or have been destroyed entirely. The number of attacks is declining, as is the number of racially or religiously motivated killings. In January, death squads executed, murdered or tortured 1,800 Iraqis to death, merely because they were Sunnis or Shiites or Christians. Indeed, religious hatred was the cause of dozens of deaths every day.

In June, 600 people were killed for the same reasons -- a number that is still atrocious, unacceptable and horrific -- but at least it represents a decline. And while these numbers are still disappointing, they do give reason for hope.

Earlier this year, thousands of attacks occurred every week, and hundreds died daily. It seemed that terror reigned supreme, that its resources were inexhaustible. But now the trend appears to be reversing itself. Terror is weakening, and its leaders, most recently al-Qaida's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are issuing dramatic appeals to radical communities not to give up the fight. This is a good sign. "They are no longer on schedule,” Petraeus says. “They have a problem."

One is that Iraq has come a long way in developing its own security forces. There are now 194,000 police officers in uniform, and the Iraqi army has 154,000 newly recruited soldiers. These organizations are still not as fully functional as they should be, and there have been many reports of corruption and religious activities, but there’s been a noticeable shift nonetheless. In the past few weeks, the Americans were not the only ones capturing and killing terrorists. The Iraqis have also been successful. The local police forces, for example, regularly obtain information directly from the population that leads them to the terrorists' weapons caches, training camps and bomb factories.

Something is happening in Iraq that is consistently concealed behind images of bombings. The situation that the White House and its deceptive advisors had erroneously predicted before their invasion -- that the troops would be greeted with candy and flowers -- could in fact still come true. That's already the case in many places. It's as if the terrorists have lost popular support, as if their acts of violence have driven the Iraqi people into the arms of the enemy, the Americans.

But there is little talk of these developments outside of Iraq. The world continues to debate the Bush administration’s lies, which hang over the entire operation like a curse, concealing its successes. The lies are legend, and they continue to color the picture the world paints of Iraq.

Old Lies Breed Skepticism

No one can forget how the hawks twisted the truth to engineer reasons to go to war -- the made-up stories of Saddam Hussein as a mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks and the trumped-up reports about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. President George W. Bush himself repeatedly told his people and the rest of world horrible fairy tales, painting the most glaring of disaster scenarios, talking ad nauseam about unmanned Iraqi drones that, in his imagination, posed a threat to the US.

The lies didn’t stop there, not even after the invasion. Bush kept promising that American troops were on the verge of uncovering Iraq's imaginary weapons of mass destruction. And on May 1, 2003, he gave his now notorious "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. At that point, though, the real war hadn't even begun yet.

Bush's advisors, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, continually promised imminent victory. In May 2005, Cheney said that the insurgents were in their "death throes." The following March, Bush said there was still fighting ahead, "in the coming days and months," but another 16 months have since passed. After building so many houses of cards and castles in the sky, it should come as little surprise to the Bush administration now that, even as successes gradually begin to materialize, most take the good news with a grain of salt.

General Petraeus deals with this skepticism day after day, and he is losing the battle for public opinion. Whenever the terrorists score another major victory, when they successfully bomb their way into their own "CNN moments," the television images seem more powerful than hundreds of reports coming in from his senior military staff that they have arrested thousands of terrorists. It is a war of images, and each new attack seems to trivialize the US military's efforts -- especially when reporters, their faces lit up by nearby flames, ask how many more American soldiers must die in this merciless war.

By July 31, 3,659 American soldiers had died in Iraq war; but none died on the day of my meeting with Petraeus. Early that evening, he walks around his desk, bends over a computer screen, scans graphs and columns of numbers, and says, "Still no casualties. It's good news, outstanding news, we don't get that a lot here."