Meanwhile, Back in Baghdad

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plain,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
And go to your Gawd like a soldier

Or so wrote Kipling, about earlier Middle Eastern adventures. That's what I call poetry.  Maybe Bush should be reading Kipling instead of Camus.  Or maybe not.  A few hours spent in Rudyard's company gives a hint of how much the balance of power has shifted in favor of modern, Western armies.  In Kipling's day the British people learned of the annihilation of whole armies weeks after the fact.  These days we learn of the death of three soldiers within the hour. 

It looks as though the threat to security in Iraq has shifted from the insurgency, which has been increasingly marginalized, to the Shiite death squads which are supported by Iran.  David Ignatius, in RealClearPolitics, has an eyewitness report on the struggle to neutralize this menace. 

Gen. John Abizaid made headlines three weeks ago when he told Congress that civil war was a possibility in Iraq. Yesterday he went into two of Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhoods to see whether a new U.S.-led offensive against the death squads and insurgents is making any progress.  Abizaid invited me and a CBS reporter to join him on this journey into the heart of the Baghdad battle zone. In what follows, I want to draw a picture of what we saw.  ...

Even Abizaid, who as head of U.S. Central Command has overall responsibility for the troops here, had to admit in his congressional testimony that the trends were going the wrong way. Baghdad was being terrorized by Sunni insurgents and Shiite death squads. More than 1,500 people were murdered in Baghdad in July, a daily average of 52 victims a day. The level of sectarian violence was so high that many wondered whether Iraq wasn't already in a civil war.  . . .

In response to sectarian violence, the U.S. redeployed forces to Baghdad, which it could easily do since the rest of the country is quiet.  Ignatius describes the result.

As we entered Amiriyah in the late afternoon of a 115-degree August day, the streets were almost deserted. When the cleanup began, the area was cordoned off and then searched house to house by U.S. and Iraqi troops. People live behind their gates; through the metal fences, you can see well-tended gardens, despite the trash in the alleys. Surprisingly, perhaps, there was little resistance. People were fed up. In the two weeks since the crackdown began, there has been a 44 percent decline in violent attacks compared with the previous month and an 83 percent drop in murders.  . . .

We stopped a few minutes later at Abbas Mosque, a small Sunni shrine. Sheik Khaled Mohammed al-Ubaidi, dressed in a knitted white prayer cap and a long white robe, came out to greet Abizaid. The general asked if security had improved and the sheik answered: "Thank God, yes!" Now that U.S. forces are going after Shiite death squads, he said, Sunnis here "understand the Americans are serious about the rule of law." (In the past three weeks, the U.S. military has killed about 25 death squad leaders and captured more than 200, according to Thurman.)

The cleanup has brought a similar respite to Doura, the second neighborhood we visited. You can still see the pieces of red tape on the front gates of each of the homes that were swept. The murder rate has fallen by 83 percent in August, compared with the 30 days before the crackdown began. For Baghdad overall, the murder rate has dropped 41 percent this month.

What does the new battle of Baghdad tell us? I'm still mulling the answer, but my sense is that it's something we already knew: With enough troops and aggressive tactics, American forces can bring order to even the meanest streets. But it's only the Iraqis themselves who can stabilize these neighborhoods permanently.

Ignatius is concerned that the Iraqi government is not in fact or in appearance involved enough in bringing order to the capital. 

As was not the case during the Vietnam war, the current anti-war movement is largely innocent of any sympathy with the hostile regime, or the insurgents, let alone with the death squads.  There are exceptions on the radical left, but pretty much no one I know on the anti-war side really wants the insurgents to win.  But being anti-war does put you in the awkward position that any bad news bolsters your case, and any good news has to be qualified.  "Yeah it's great that so many men and women voted, but . . ."   

I have never endorsed the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq, but I have been persistently optimistic about the chances of democracy in Iraq.  This may well make me look like a fool in the long run, but just right now it allows me to give a hearty cheer to a small victory.