No Oil for Pacifists: Iraqi Opinion, Part XIV

From a Newsweek story by Melinda Liu:

Around the room, Marines and Iraqi tribesmen and police are sitting together, swapping jokes and stories. Some of these Iraqis were probably shooting at Americans less than a year ago. Now they and the Marines are fighting side by side against Al Qaeda. "We are not just friends but also brothers," the sheik [Shakir Saoud Aasi] tells [Marine Lt. Col. Craig] Kozeniesky. "This is a new beginning for both of us." Kozeniesky can only agree: "Things have changed dramatically." A 5-year-old Iraqi boy in traditional robes and headdress is racing around the room and vaulting into U.S. troops' laps. What does he want to be when he grows up? He proudly announces: "American general named Steve!"

The Pentagon is praying that its new allies will reconfigure the war. The success of the Ramadi experiment has given rise to hopes that the model can be applied elsewhere in Iraq. A year ago insurgents were launching nearly 30 attacks a day in the city; now the daily average is less than one. Anbar province as a whole is showing similar improvements. Brig. Gen. John R. Allen, deputy commanding general of the Second Marine Expeditionary Force in Anbar and a tribal-affairs expert, describes the province as "a laboratory for counterinsurgency." From roughly 500 attacks a week, the rate has sunk to barely a third of that figure. Weapons-cache discoveries, based largely on tips from sympathetic Iraqis in Ramadi, have skyrocketed nearly 190 percent. The fledgling local police force could muster only 20 recruits a year ago; today, with local sheiks encouraging tribe members to sign up, it has 8,000. . .

The insurgents are in retreat now, thanks largely to traditional tribal leaders who began trying to organize themselves in late 2005. The radicals of Al Qaeda in Iraq, who were led at the time by the murderous Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, "went after them with a vengeance," says General Allen. "It was very bloody and very ugly." Late last year local sheiks—most of whom had by this point lost family members to the killings—formed a group they called Anbar Awakening. Their leader, Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Rishah, had lost three brothers and his father to insurgent attacks. The sheiks ordered their followers to assist the Americans against the jihadists—and among Iraq's tribesmen even today, the sheik is the law.

Engram at Back Talk challenges the commonplace assumptions:

[I]f you ask around, you'll find that almost every opponent of the invasion of Iraq believes that we have simply ruined a stable country that, as bad it was, was nevertheless much better than what it has become. But as I have noted before, if you ask the Iraqi people themselves (who should know), they disagree. The results are not as lopsided as they once were, which makes sense given that things are a lot worse now than they were two years ago, but it is still the case that more Iraqis prefer their current life to life as it was under Saddam Hussein:

(source: BBC poll)

. . .Things are bad in Iraq, and no one can possibly deny it.

But how bad? Almost -- but not quite -- as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein.