JoaMei
08-12-2007, 09:30 AM
Long optimistic article about the Situation in Iraq from the german perspective, opinions?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,499154,00.html
Part 1 of the Article
BAGHDAD BABYLON
Hope and Despair in Divided Iraq
By Ullrich Fichtner in Iraq
When describing Iraq, the word "peace" is seldom used. Truth be told, the Americans have restored order to many parts of the county. But Iraq remains fractured, and where new schools are built today, bombs could explode tomorrow.
http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,939495,00.jpg
The "Hands of Victory" in Baghdad's Green Zone:
The US military is more successful in Iraq than the world wants to believe.
The Iraq war came within a hair of returning to Ramadi in early July. The attackers had already gathered four kilometers (about 2.5 miles) south of the city, on the banks of the Nasr canal. Between 40 and 50 men dressed in light uniforms were armed like soldiers and prepared to commit a series of suicide bombings. They had already strapped explosive vests to their bodies and loaded thousands of kilograms of explosives, missiles and grenades onto two old Mercedes trucks. But their plan was foiled when Iraqis intent on preserving peace in Ramadi betrayed them to the Americans.
Army Units of the 1st Battalion of the 77th United States Armor Regiment -- nicknamed the "Steel Tigers" and sent from an American base in Schweinfurt, Germany -- approached from the north and south. But the enemy was strong and they quickly realized that in order to defeat it, they needed air support. Before long, Apache combat helicopters, F-18 Hornet and AV-8 Harrier jets approached, the explosions from their guns lighting up the night sky on June 30.
The "Battle of Donkey Island," named after the wild donkeys native to the region, lasted 23 hours. The Americans forced the enemy to engage in trench warfare in the rough brush, eventually trapping them in the vast riverside landscape. It wasn't until later, after the soldiers lost two of their own and killed 35 terrorists, that they realized the scope of the disaster they had foiled.
Three of the captured attackers, who claimed to be members of al-Qaida in Iraq, revealed their plan to plunge Ramadi into chaos once again by staging multiple attacks in broad daylight. By unleashing a devastating series of suicide attacks on the city, they hoped to destroy the delicate peace in Ramadi and bring the war back to its markets, squares, streets and residential neighborhoods.
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/0,5538,23830,00.html
Two weeks after the battle, Ian Lauer is walking through Ramadi's western Tameem neighborhood, the edges of which melt into the vast Syrian Desert. Lauer, a captain, is in charge of Charlie Company. He hasn't forgotten the Battle of Donkey Island. The members of his company have just emerged from four armor-plated Humvees and are now strolling toward a nearby mosque.
"A few months ago, you couldn't have taken a single step here without getting shot at," says Lauer, a fair-skinned 30-year-old who still seems oddly pale under his suntan "We couldn't leave our ****ing camp without being ****ing shot at," he says. "Now it's peaceful and it's ****ing great."
The Turning Point
In October, 90 "incidents" were reported in Tameem, an area no larger than a few city blocks in Berlin. Twenty of those incidents involved attacks on US troops by gangs of insurgents. Wherever the Americans went they were shot at from apartment buildings, three times with rockets and four times with rocket-propelled grenades. Sixteen remote-controlled bombs exploded along the neighborhood's streets, 14 homemade explosive devices were found and defused, snipers attacked the occupying troops twice and one hidden car bomb was found, ready for use. And so the story continued: throughout November, December, January and February.
By March, however, the number of incidents reported in Tameem had dropped to 43, including only four direct attacks with rifles and pistols and one rocket attack. There were no bombings, snipers, rocket-propelled grenades or car bombs. And the leaders of the region's 23 powerful clans were finally meeting with US commanders for "security conferences," while the imams from the city's mosques met with the military's chaplains.
The Iraqis in Ramadi, almost all Sunnis, had been worn down by chronic violence. Many had been victims of kidnappings or blackmail at the hands of mafia-like terrorist groups. They had finally come to the realization that, in the long run, the Americans were less of a threat and offered more hope than the fanatical holy warriors from Iraq and abroad.
Families began sending their sons to join the new Iraqi police force and military and fathers ran for municipal offices. They began cooperating with US military officials, turning in bombers and revealing their weapons caches, all while going about their daily lives, running their businesses, working as contractors, shipping agents and garbage collectors. Teachers returned to their classrooms, doctors began treating patients again and store owners restocked their shelves. Iraqis were now building the barbed wire barriers around the city, constructed to force travelers through checkpoints. Iraqis even manned the checkpoints as the Americans -- the Iraqis' former enemies -- retreated to the background, watching over as the city made a fresh start.
Since June, Ramadi residents have only known the war from televison. Indeed, US military officials at the Baghdad headquarters of Operation Iraqi Freedom often have trouble believing their eyes when they read the reports coming in from their units in Ramadi these days. Exploded car bombs: zero. Detonated roadside bombs: zero. Rocket fire: zero. Grenade fire: zero. Shots from rifles and pistols: zero. Weapons caches discovered: dozens. Terrorists arrested: many.
An Irritating Contraction
Ramadi is an irritating contradiction of almost everything the world thinks it knows about Iraq -- it is proof that the US military is more successful than the world wants to believe. Ramadi demonstrates that large parts of Iraq -- not just Anbar Province, but also many other rural areas along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers -- are essentially pacified today. This is news the world doesn't hear: Ramadi, long a hotbed of unrest, a city that once formed the southwestern tip of the notorious "Sunni Triangle," is now telling a different story, a story of Americans who came here as liberators, became hated occupiers and are now the protectors of Iraqi reconstruction.
It's Friday, the Muslim day of rest. The city is practically asleep, the air filled a powder-fine sand the soldiers like to call "moon dust." Though still morning, it's 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46 degrees Celsius) outside. In the afternoon, the Iraqi national soccer team will play against Australia in the Asian Cup and win the match, 3:1. Sporting victories, of course, are something Iraqis haven't had much time to think about in the past four years. Shots will be heard in the city after the final whistle, bullets of joy fired off into the blue sky, salutes to a new Iraq.
The square in front of the mosque, a trash-covered wasteland between ruined rows of houses, fills up with people at the end of Friday prayers. Children hang on the American soldiers like grapes on a vine, plucking at their trousers, vying for their attention, for a glance, a piece of candy, a dollar, gazing up at the big foreigners as if they were gods.
The Americans run into acquaintances in the crowd. After being stationed in the city for 10 months, they have become a familiar sight. Bearded men greet the soldiers with hugs and kisses, and passersby hand them cold cans of lemonade. "Thank you, Mister," "Hello, Mister," "How are you, Mister?" they say. They talk about paint for schools and soccer jerseys, and they invite the Americans over for lunch. The Iraqis pose for photos with them, making "V's" for "victory" with their fingers.
Lauer's unit arrives at the home of Ali Chudeir, a charming 30-year-old construction company manager in need of a good dentist. His English is good, but only, he says, because his father practically pounded five new vocabulary words into his head each day as a kid. Bodyguards armed with Kalashnikov rifles lurk around his front door. Chudeir still doesn't fully trust the newfound peace that has come to town. The terrorists, he warns, could return. They are still lurking outside the city, randomly attacking people, he says. "This will continue for a long time. That's why the Americans should stay here longer."
It's clear that Lauer and Chudeir have become friends. They have a lot in common: Both are 30 and have children, Lauer three and Chudeir four. When the Iraqi heard that his American friend was shot in the back at the Battle of Donkey Island, he says, "My family and I wept and prayed for him." The bullet that had hit Lauer stopped just in time to spare his life. It ripped a hole in his T-shirt, but produced nothing more serious than a large bruise thanks to the Kevlar vest he was wearing. But Lauer doesn't like to talk about it, saying only, "I'm a lucky bastard."
Five American officers sit on sofas in front of Chudeir's desk, behaving as if they were on leave, their guns leaning carelessly against a wall, their bulletproof vests removed as they watch Arab MTV on television. Anyone who has satellite TV in Iraq can receive up to 200 stations, including Egyptian Koran channels and Saudi Arabian religious broadcasts, "Pulp Fiction" and "Star Wars" on movie channels, Japanese game shows and English animal series. Five or six news stations are on the air 24 hours a day, while others broadcast European football matches, shows about makeup, cooking, Bollywood movies and luxury car commercials -- mirages of a more carefree life beyond Iraq.
Dinner arrives and it's a true feast, with a spread of kebabs and large pieces of roast chicken, salad and rice with coriander leaves. Chudeir serves sumptuous meals whenever the Americans come to visit, not only because he is a good host, but also because he is grateful to his American friends. Thanks to the American engineers, he says, the city has up to 10 hours of electricity a day now. "We have never had this in all of Ramadi's history. In the end, we will live like civilized people."
As his friends leave, Chudeir waves goodbye with both arms while other neighbors to the left and right do the same. Once again, passersby make the "V" for "victory" sign, greeting the soldiers, "Hello, Mister. How are you?" They're like scenes from another country, another city, a different movie.
The world has become deaf to the word "peace" -- at least when conversations turn to Iraq. It is as if the world were blind to the possibility that the situation in this country straddling the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers could be anything different from the constant stream of increasingly devastating films of the latest car bombings. For most people, Iraq has become nothing but a series of attacks, a collection of images of bombings and victims, a tale of failure, a book about historical guilt and a symbol of the moral decline of the United States of America.
But the real story in Iraq cannot be summed up in short news clips and quick, shaky television images. Body counts and names of the dead tell only part of the story of Iraq today. Research for this story took me on a three-week journey throughout the country, my fourth trip to Iraq in as many years. Under the protection of the US military, it led us to the northern city of Mosul and its suburbs, to Ramadi and to Baghdad. The military did not choose our destinations, SPIEGEL did. Apart from a few technical and strategic details, nothing was censored.
The trip included nighttime helicopter flights across villages and cities, journeys in Humvees through landscapes of burned-out buildings, rides in an armored personnel carrier through war zones and walks through both enemy territory and peaceful markets. This kind of travel is the only way for a Western journalist to work in Iraq. Without a military escort, reporting can only take place from afar, from the relative safety of well-guarded hotel rooms. Of course, hotel rooms aren't the best vantage point from which to grasp the true complexity of the situation. At no point during this journey, even in places where there was gunfire or bombs had recently exploded, were the images entirely consistent.
Car Bombs Here, New Schools There
In Iraq today, car bombs are detonated here while new schools are being built there. And as new hotels open in one part of the country, terrorists lob bombs into wedding parties elsewhere. Some Iraqis are buying new refrigerators, toasters and video games, while others smuggle explosives into the country and sabotage oil pipelines. Children play the violin or the trumpet in music competitions while, only a few blocks away, men from Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan, Iran or Saudi Arabia attach sticks of dynamite to their bodies to bomb themselves into paradise on busy city squares. The Iraq of today is not a single place that is easy to understand -- it is a country mired in contradictions.
In some parts of the country, especially Baghdad, the situation is even worse than was feared, and in others, it is much better than anyone could have hoped. Traveling through Iraq, four years, four months and a few days after the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom on March 20, 2003, one encounters a country undergoing radical change, not just a country in decline, not just a country falling apart, but also not a country that has been saved.
The situation is so complicated that even the leaders of Operation Iraqi Freedom are sometimes at a loss for words and can do little more than shrug their shoulders. General David Petraeus even has to suppress a nervous laugh when he talks about the immense task he faces.
Commanding the Surge
Petraeus is the commander of a multinational force in Iraq, which is no longer particularly multinational. He commands about 160,000 American soldiers, the size of the current force after the troop "surge" ordered by US President George W. Bush, which was completed a few weeks ago.
The word "surge" seems fitting. It suggests that this is the United States' final push, its last chance to succeed. If this newly revamped force fails to achieve the elusive goal coalition forces have been pursuing unsuccessfully all along -- to stabilize and pacify Iraq -- then the entire operation will be a miserable failure. Iraq will collapse, and the United States will face humiliating defeat and a disgraceful withdrawal that could impact political stability throughout the world.
Petraeus has just finished up a phone call with a Turkish military official and he is running late. Instead of meeting at his Camp Victory headquarters at the Baghdad Airport, we go to Petraeus' office in former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's palace in the Green Zone, the sealed-off section of the city reserved for the Americans, the Iraqi government and their guests.
The Green Zone, officially known as the "International Zone," has become a forbidden city inside the Iraqi capital, surrounded by high concrete walls and accessible only after traversing through an obstacle course of checkpoints.
Both visitors and residents must present their badges at every street corner, where NATO wire and stone barriers dominate the scenery. There are 15 different color-coded identification badges for Green Zone residents, each providing a different level of access privileges. Like a fortress, the new, clay-colored US embassy building (the world's largest) dominates this labyrinth of walls and guard posts, which resembles an open-air bunker more and more every day. The embassy, still empty, stands behind miles of walls reminiscent of urban scenes behind the former Iron Curtain.
It's cold in Petraeus' office. Marines guard his rooms in the palace, which are located behind a series of reinforced doors. A pair of crossed flags stands behind his desk. Petraeus takes a few cans of Diet Pepsi and Sprite from the refrigerator and serves them himself. When he began his tenure here in January, just after the US president appointed and promoted him to become a four-star general, he wrote in an e-mail that the job would be "tough, but not impossible," and that "no one can be interested in a failed Iraq."
Now he sits in a chair in front of a couch, talking about his experiences here. In the first year of the war, Petraeus led the 101st Airborne Division up to Mosul. Then he developed a doctrine on fighting insurgents. Now he leads an entire army. He has placed one of his boots on the low coffee table, a quiet, slim man whose name will appear in the history books.
This September, Patraeus will present his report on the situation in Iraq to the US Congress in Washington, where he must explain the military options. His appearance will come in the middle of an election, and Washington's political and media spin machine will eagerly twist his sentences and dissect his every word, taking his statements out of context and turning them into ammunition for their theories and counter-theories. Petraeus has nothing to gain from this game. No matter what he ultimately says, everyone in Washington -- friends and foes alike -- will end up quoting him.
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 **** 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."
Petraeus is often asked whether his troops are able to hold up their level of morale. Lately, he's had a lot of visitors, and they all ask him the same question. Members of Congress, Senators and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been to see Petraeus, as have Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Vice President Cheney. They fly directly into the Green Zone, bringing temporary chaos to Iraqi air traffic. And after spending just 12 hours in Baghdad, they are convinced that they understand the situation in Iraq.
So is morale intact? Petraeus makes a few vague gestures. "It really depends on the day," he says. "When a unit has just lost people, it won't have good things to say about the mission. But when it has just uncovered a weapons factory, then everyone is excited and proud to be doing the right thing. That's the way it is."
The mood runs the gamut among US military personnel at the central air bases in this war. There is always plenty of time to talk at these hubs for troop transports because the surge has triggered a logistical nightmare with delays that sometimes last days at a time.
At the big air bases -- the airports in Baghdad, Balad, and Takaddum in Iraq, and at the Ali al-Salam air base in Kuwait -- one gets the sense that the operation is being pushed to its limits. For the surge, entire battalions have had to move around without their transport and reinforcement units. Some brigade commanders who would normally be in charge of four battalions now have six or seven under their command, and they lack aircraft, helicopters, trucks, armored personnel carriers and Humvees.
It is not unusual to see entire platoons waiting up to 48 hours at the Baghdad Airport before they can fly to their next location because all the flights are full. The airfields resemble army camps, with soldiers playing cards along the edges of runways or dozing in the heat, using their protective vests as makeshift pillows.
The US military's civilian contractors are interspersed among the uniformed troops, wild-looking deal-makers, tattooed adventurers often dressed like daring comic-book characters, complete with shotguns strapped to their backs, old World War helmets, leather vests and cowboy boots. They are employees of companies like KBR, Aegis Defense Services, Blackwater and Ecolog: forklift drivers, electricians, spare parts suppliers and oil people. They make as much money in a year in Iraq as they would make in an entire decade at home.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,499154,00.html
Part 1 of the Article
BAGHDAD BABYLON
Hope and Despair in Divided Iraq
By Ullrich Fichtner in Iraq
When describing Iraq, the word "peace" is seldom used. Truth be told, the Americans have restored order to many parts of the county. But Iraq remains fractured, and where new schools are built today, bombs could explode tomorrow.
http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,939495,00.jpg
The "Hands of Victory" in Baghdad's Green Zone:
The US military is more successful in Iraq than the world wants to believe.
The Iraq war came within a hair of returning to Ramadi in early July. The attackers had already gathered four kilometers (about 2.5 miles) south of the city, on the banks of the Nasr canal. Between 40 and 50 men dressed in light uniforms were armed like soldiers and prepared to commit a series of suicide bombings. They had already strapped explosive vests to their bodies and loaded thousands of kilograms of explosives, missiles and grenades onto two old Mercedes trucks. But their plan was foiled when Iraqis intent on preserving peace in Ramadi betrayed them to the Americans.
Army Units of the 1st Battalion of the 77th United States Armor Regiment -- nicknamed the "Steel Tigers" and sent from an American base in Schweinfurt, Germany -- approached from the north and south. But the enemy was strong and they quickly realized that in order to defeat it, they needed air support. Before long, Apache combat helicopters, F-18 Hornet and AV-8 Harrier jets approached, the explosions from their guns lighting up the night sky on June 30.
The "Battle of Donkey Island," named after the wild donkeys native to the region, lasted 23 hours. The Americans forced the enemy to engage in trench warfare in the rough brush, eventually trapping them in the vast riverside landscape. It wasn't until later, after the soldiers lost two of their own and killed 35 terrorists, that they realized the scope of the disaster they had foiled.
Three of the captured attackers, who claimed to be members of al-Qaida in Iraq, revealed their plan to plunge Ramadi into chaos once again by staging multiple attacks in broad daylight. By unleashing a devastating series of suicide attacks on the city, they hoped to destroy the delicate peace in Ramadi and bring the war back to its markets, squares, streets and residential neighborhoods.
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/0,5538,23830,00.html
Two weeks after the battle, Ian Lauer is walking through Ramadi's western Tameem neighborhood, the edges of which melt into the vast Syrian Desert. Lauer, a captain, is in charge of Charlie Company. He hasn't forgotten the Battle of Donkey Island. The members of his company have just emerged from four armor-plated Humvees and are now strolling toward a nearby mosque.
"A few months ago, you couldn't have taken a single step here without getting shot at," says Lauer, a fair-skinned 30-year-old who still seems oddly pale under his suntan "We couldn't leave our ****ing camp without being ****ing shot at," he says. "Now it's peaceful and it's ****ing great."
The Turning Point
In October, 90 "incidents" were reported in Tameem, an area no larger than a few city blocks in Berlin. Twenty of those incidents involved attacks on US troops by gangs of insurgents. Wherever the Americans went they were shot at from apartment buildings, three times with rockets and four times with rocket-propelled grenades. Sixteen remote-controlled bombs exploded along the neighborhood's streets, 14 homemade explosive devices were found and defused, snipers attacked the occupying troops twice and one hidden car bomb was found, ready for use. And so the story continued: throughout November, December, January and February.
By March, however, the number of incidents reported in Tameem had dropped to 43, including only four direct attacks with rifles and pistols and one rocket attack. There were no bombings, snipers, rocket-propelled grenades or car bombs. And the leaders of the region's 23 powerful clans were finally meeting with US commanders for "security conferences," while the imams from the city's mosques met with the military's chaplains.
The Iraqis in Ramadi, almost all Sunnis, had been worn down by chronic violence. Many had been victims of kidnappings or blackmail at the hands of mafia-like terrorist groups. They had finally come to the realization that, in the long run, the Americans were less of a threat and offered more hope than the fanatical holy warriors from Iraq and abroad.
Families began sending their sons to join the new Iraqi police force and military and fathers ran for municipal offices. They began cooperating with US military officials, turning in bombers and revealing their weapons caches, all while going about their daily lives, running their businesses, working as contractors, shipping agents and garbage collectors. Teachers returned to their classrooms, doctors began treating patients again and store owners restocked their shelves. Iraqis were now building the barbed wire barriers around the city, constructed to force travelers through checkpoints. Iraqis even manned the checkpoints as the Americans -- the Iraqis' former enemies -- retreated to the background, watching over as the city made a fresh start.
Since June, Ramadi residents have only known the war from televison. Indeed, US military officials at the Baghdad headquarters of Operation Iraqi Freedom often have trouble believing their eyes when they read the reports coming in from their units in Ramadi these days. Exploded car bombs: zero. Detonated roadside bombs: zero. Rocket fire: zero. Grenade fire: zero. Shots from rifles and pistols: zero. Weapons caches discovered: dozens. Terrorists arrested: many.
An Irritating Contraction
Ramadi is an irritating contradiction of almost everything the world thinks it knows about Iraq -- it is proof that the US military is more successful than the world wants to believe. Ramadi demonstrates that large parts of Iraq -- not just Anbar Province, but also many other rural areas along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers -- are essentially pacified today. This is news the world doesn't hear: Ramadi, long a hotbed of unrest, a city that once formed the southwestern tip of the notorious "Sunni Triangle," is now telling a different story, a story of Americans who came here as liberators, became hated occupiers and are now the protectors of Iraqi reconstruction.
It's Friday, the Muslim day of rest. The city is practically asleep, the air filled a powder-fine sand the soldiers like to call "moon dust." Though still morning, it's 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46 degrees Celsius) outside. In the afternoon, the Iraqi national soccer team will play against Australia in the Asian Cup and win the match, 3:1. Sporting victories, of course, are something Iraqis haven't had much time to think about in the past four years. Shots will be heard in the city after the final whistle, bullets of joy fired off into the blue sky, salutes to a new Iraq.
The square in front of the mosque, a trash-covered wasteland between ruined rows of houses, fills up with people at the end of Friday prayers. Children hang on the American soldiers like grapes on a vine, plucking at their trousers, vying for their attention, for a glance, a piece of candy, a dollar, gazing up at the big foreigners as if they were gods.
The Americans run into acquaintances in the crowd. After being stationed in the city for 10 months, they have become a familiar sight. Bearded men greet the soldiers with hugs and kisses, and passersby hand them cold cans of lemonade. "Thank you, Mister," "Hello, Mister," "How are you, Mister?" they say. They talk about paint for schools and soccer jerseys, and they invite the Americans over for lunch. The Iraqis pose for photos with them, making "V's" for "victory" with their fingers.
Lauer's unit arrives at the home of Ali Chudeir, a charming 30-year-old construction company manager in need of a good dentist. His English is good, but only, he says, because his father practically pounded five new vocabulary words into his head each day as a kid. Bodyguards armed with Kalashnikov rifles lurk around his front door. Chudeir still doesn't fully trust the newfound peace that has come to town. The terrorists, he warns, could return. They are still lurking outside the city, randomly attacking people, he says. "This will continue for a long time. That's why the Americans should stay here longer."
It's clear that Lauer and Chudeir have become friends. They have a lot in common: Both are 30 and have children, Lauer three and Chudeir four. When the Iraqi heard that his American friend was shot in the back at the Battle of Donkey Island, he says, "My family and I wept and prayed for him." The bullet that had hit Lauer stopped just in time to spare his life. It ripped a hole in his T-shirt, but produced nothing more serious than a large bruise thanks to the Kevlar vest he was wearing. But Lauer doesn't like to talk about it, saying only, "I'm a lucky bastard."
Five American officers sit on sofas in front of Chudeir's desk, behaving as if they were on leave, their guns leaning carelessly against a wall, their bulletproof vests removed as they watch Arab MTV on television. Anyone who has satellite TV in Iraq can receive up to 200 stations, including Egyptian Koran channels and Saudi Arabian religious broadcasts, "Pulp Fiction" and "Star Wars" on movie channels, Japanese game shows and English animal series. Five or six news stations are on the air 24 hours a day, while others broadcast European football matches, shows about makeup, cooking, Bollywood movies and luxury car commercials -- mirages of a more carefree life beyond Iraq.
Dinner arrives and it's a true feast, with a spread of kebabs and large pieces of roast chicken, salad and rice with coriander leaves. Chudeir serves sumptuous meals whenever the Americans come to visit, not only because he is a good host, but also because he is grateful to his American friends. Thanks to the American engineers, he says, the city has up to 10 hours of electricity a day now. "We have never had this in all of Ramadi's history. In the end, we will live like civilized people."
As his friends leave, Chudeir waves goodbye with both arms while other neighbors to the left and right do the same. Once again, passersby make the "V" for "victory" sign, greeting the soldiers, "Hello, Mister. How are you?" They're like scenes from another country, another city, a different movie.
The world has become deaf to the word "peace" -- at least when conversations turn to Iraq. It is as if the world were blind to the possibility that the situation in this country straddling the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers could be anything different from the constant stream of increasingly devastating films of the latest car bombings. For most people, Iraq has become nothing but a series of attacks, a collection of images of bombings and victims, a tale of failure, a book about historical guilt and a symbol of the moral decline of the United States of America.
But the real story in Iraq cannot be summed up in short news clips and quick, shaky television images. Body counts and names of the dead tell only part of the story of Iraq today. Research for this story took me on a three-week journey throughout the country, my fourth trip to Iraq in as many years. Under the protection of the US military, it led us to the northern city of Mosul and its suburbs, to Ramadi and to Baghdad. The military did not choose our destinations, SPIEGEL did. Apart from a few technical and strategic details, nothing was censored.
The trip included nighttime helicopter flights across villages and cities, journeys in Humvees through landscapes of burned-out buildings, rides in an armored personnel carrier through war zones and walks through both enemy territory and peaceful markets. This kind of travel is the only way for a Western journalist to work in Iraq. Without a military escort, reporting can only take place from afar, from the relative safety of well-guarded hotel rooms. Of course, hotel rooms aren't the best vantage point from which to grasp the true complexity of the situation. At no point during this journey, even in places where there was gunfire or bombs had recently exploded, were the images entirely consistent.
Car Bombs Here, New Schools There
In Iraq today, car bombs are detonated here while new schools are being built there. And as new hotels open in one part of the country, terrorists lob bombs into wedding parties elsewhere. Some Iraqis are buying new refrigerators, toasters and video games, while others smuggle explosives into the country and sabotage oil pipelines. Children play the violin or the trumpet in music competitions while, only a few blocks away, men from Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan, Iran or Saudi Arabia attach sticks of dynamite to their bodies to bomb themselves into paradise on busy city squares. The Iraq of today is not a single place that is easy to understand -- it is a country mired in contradictions.
In some parts of the country, especially Baghdad, the situation is even worse than was feared, and in others, it is much better than anyone could have hoped. Traveling through Iraq, four years, four months and a few days after the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom on March 20, 2003, one encounters a country undergoing radical change, not just a country in decline, not just a country falling apart, but also not a country that has been saved.
The situation is so complicated that even the leaders of Operation Iraqi Freedom are sometimes at a loss for words and can do little more than shrug their shoulders. General David Petraeus even has to suppress a nervous laugh when he talks about the immense task he faces.
Commanding the Surge
Petraeus is the commander of a multinational force in Iraq, which is no longer particularly multinational. He commands about 160,000 American soldiers, the size of the current force after the troop "surge" ordered by US President George W. Bush, which was completed a few weeks ago.
The word "surge" seems fitting. It suggests that this is the United States' final push, its last chance to succeed. If this newly revamped force fails to achieve the elusive goal coalition forces have been pursuing unsuccessfully all along -- to stabilize and pacify Iraq -- then the entire operation will be a miserable failure. Iraq will collapse, and the United States will face humiliating defeat and a disgraceful withdrawal that could impact political stability throughout the world.
Petraeus has just finished up a phone call with a Turkish military official and he is running late. Instead of meeting at his Camp Victory headquarters at the Baghdad Airport, we go to Petraeus' office in former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's palace in the Green Zone, the sealed-off section of the city reserved for the Americans, the Iraqi government and their guests.
The Green Zone, officially known as the "International Zone," has become a forbidden city inside the Iraqi capital, surrounded by high concrete walls and accessible only after traversing through an obstacle course of checkpoints.
Both visitors and residents must present their badges at every street corner, where NATO wire and stone barriers dominate the scenery. There are 15 different color-coded identification badges for Green Zone residents, each providing a different level of access privileges. Like a fortress, the new, clay-colored US embassy building (the world's largest) dominates this labyrinth of walls and guard posts, which resembles an open-air bunker more and more every day. The embassy, still empty, stands behind miles of walls reminiscent of urban scenes behind the former Iron Curtain.
It's cold in Petraeus' office. Marines guard his rooms in the palace, which are located behind a series of reinforced doors. A pair of crossed flags stands behind his desk. Petraeus takes a few cans of Diet Pepsi and Sprite from the refrigerator and serves them himself. When he began his tenure here in January, just after the US president appointed and promoted him to become a four-star general, he wrote in an e-mail that the job would be "tough, but not impossible," and that "no one can be interested in a failed Iraq."
Now he sits in a chair in front of a couch, talking about his experiences here. In the first year of the war, Petraeus led the 101st Airborne Division up to Mosul. Then he developed a doctrine on fighting insurgents. Now he leads an entire army. He has placed one of his boots on the low coffee table, a quiet, slim man whose name will appear in the history books.
This September, Patraeus will present his report on the situation in Iraq to the US Congress in Washington, where he must explain the military options. His appearance will come in the middle of an election, and Washington's political and media spin machine will eagerly twist his sentences and dissect his every word, taking his statements out of context and turning them into ammunition for their theories and counter-theories. Petraeus has nothing to gain from this game. No matter what he ultimately says, everyone in Washington -- friends and foes alike -- will end up quoting him.
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 **** 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."
Petraeus is often asked whether his troops are able to hold up their level of morale. Lately, he's had a lot of visitors, and they all ask him the same question. Members of Congress, Senators and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been to see Petraeus, as have Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Vice President Cheney. They fly directly into the Green Zone, bringing temporary chaos to Iraqi air traffic. And after spending just 12 hours in Baghdad, they are convinced that they understand the situation in Iraq.
So is morale intact? Petraeus makes a few vague gestures. "It really depends on the day," he says. "When a unit has just lost people, it won't have good things to say about the mission. But when it has just uncovered a weapons factory, then everyone is excited and proud to be doing the right thing. That's the way it is."
The mood runs the gamut among US military personnel at the central air bases in this war. There is always plenty of time to talk at these hubs for troop transports because the surge has triggered a logistical nightmare with delays that sometimes last days at a time.
At the big air bases -- the airports in Baghdad, Balad, and Takaddum in Iraq, and at the Ali al-Salam air base in Kuwait -- one gets the sense that the operation is being pushed to its limits. For the surge, entire battalions have had to move around without their transport and reinforcement units. Some brigade commanders who would normally be in charge of four battalions now have six or seven under their command, and they lack aircraft, helicopters, trucks, armored personnel carriers and Humvees.
It is not unusual to see entire platoons waiting up to 48 hours at the Baghdad Airport before they can fly to their next location because all the flights are full. The airfields resemble army camps, with soldiers playing cards along the edges of runways or dozing in the heat, using their protective vests as makeshift pillows.
The US military's civilian contractors are interspersed among the uniformed troops, wild-looking deal-makers, tattooed adventurers often dressed like daring comic-book characters, complete with shotguns strapped to their backs, old World War helmets, leather vests and cowboy boots. They are employees of companies like KBR, Aegis Defense Services, Blackwater and Ecolog: forklift drivers, electricians, spare parts suppliers and oil people. They make as much money in a year in Iraq as they would make in an entire decade at home.