Starting to Exhale
NYT re Baghdad: “Security improvements in most neighborhoods are real.” My question is, if joyous, returning Iraqis can exhale now, how about Harry Reid?
BAGHDAD, Nov. 19 — Five months ago, Suhaila al-Aasan lived in an oxygen tank factory with her husband and two sons, convinced that they would never go back to their apartment in Dora, a middle-class neighborhood in southern Baghdad.
Today she is home again, cooking by a sunlit window, sleeping beneath her favorite wedding picture. And yet, she and her family are remarkably alone. The half-dozen other apartments in her building echo with emptiness and, on most days, Iraqi soldiers are the only neighbors she sees.
“I feel happy,” she said, standing in her bedroom, between a flowered bedspread and a bullet hole in the wall. “But my happiness is not complete. We need more people to come back. We need more people to feel safe.”
Mrs. Aasan, 45, a Shiite librarian with an easy laugh, is living at the far end of Baghdad’s tentative recovery. She is one of many Iraqis who in recent weeks have begun to test where they can go and what they can do when fear no longer controls their every move.
The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says.
As a result, for the first time in nearly two years, people are moving with freedom around much of this city. In more than 50 interviews across Baghdad, it became clear that while there were still no-go zones, more Iraqis now drive between Sunni and Shiite areas for work, shopping or school, a few even after dark. In the most stable neighborhoods of Baghdad, some secular women are also dressing as they wish. Wedding bands are playing in public again, and at a handful of once shuttered liquor stores customers now line up outside in a collective rebuke to religious vigilantes from the Shiite Mahdi Army.
Now NYT starts reporting on the surge.
Iraqis are clearly surprised and relieved to see commerce and movement finally increase, five months after an extra 30,000 American troops arrived in the country. But the depth and sustainability of the changes remain open to question.
The real question, of course, is: Will these remarkable developments, this Iraqi joy, be undermined by the Democratic leadership in Congress? Having failed to force a precipitous withdrawal, Congress has promised to hold its breath until it turns bluer.
It’s an awkward question. While it would appear to be germane to the issue at hand, NYT doesn’t ask it here. Passing reference to additional U.S. troops being scheduled to depart, security forces need to be mixed Sunni-Shia. No discussion of whether, given the joy that has been brought to hard-luck Iraq, it may not be worth considering some further expenditure of American blood, sweat and tears to ensure this has not all been a calm before the storm. Joking, no longer fearful Iraqis don’t appear to have been asked for their thoughts on that.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:33 am on Tuesday, November 20, 2007
10 Responses to “Starting to Exhale”
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November 20th, 2007 at 11:23 am
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November 20th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Death, destruction and mayhem down. Evil selfish conservatives happy. Sharing and caring liberals sad.
Does not compute…
November 20th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
“Its never too late to surrender” — Harry Reid
November 20th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
“The War Is Lost!” — Harry Reid
November 20th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
if joyous, returning Iraqis can exhale now, how about Harry Reid?
Harry Reid will never exhale.
He’ll pop if the knee jerk mantra and few key phrases about “Iraq” on which he relies…start to fall apart.
He’ll go into seclusion, harumphing, pulling down the shades in a dark room.
It will be like what happened to Howard Hughes.
Or all kinds of “liberals” when Karl Rove wasn’t frogmarched across the White House lawn.
November 21st, 2007 at 3:01 am
Could someone remind me of the membership in the Axis of Evil again? Was it NorK, Iraq, Iran or Harry, Nancy, GeorgeS or Hugo, Danny, Fidel? I can’t keep these Axis’ separated.
November 21st, 2007 at 6:28 pm
North Korea, Iran and Iraq were the original members of the Axis of Evil mentioned by name.
November 21st, 2007 at 6:30 pm
I’m sorry, but why would any sane person want Harry Reid to exhale? That means he gets to inhale.
November 21st, 2007 at 6:35 pm
“Congress has promised to hold its breath until it turns bluer.”
along the lines of what Jeff just said, I support Congress holding its breath pretty much forever.
November 21st, 2007 at 6:46 pm
“Iraqis are clearly surprised and relieved to see commerce and movement finally increase, five months after an extra 30,000 American troops arrived in the country.”
If putting more troops in is making the violence stop, then lets pull all our garrisons out of Europe, Korea, etc. move them to Iraq, wrap this thing up and then tell the Old Worlders to go piss up a rope, and let them pay for their own defense henceforth.
After listening to all the anti-American crap spewing out of Europe the last few decades, I’d just as soon be allied with a nest of rabid rattlesnakes than the Euro-assholes. Does anyone think these guys would back us up if the shit really hit the fan? Doubt it. Hell, the lot of our so-called allies in NATO couldn’t be arsed with sending more than a handful of troops to Afghanistan after an attack that left thousands of Americans dead.
As soon as this war on terror crap is finished, I say we pull out of NATO, the U.N., etc. and go back to being a neutral country (like we always should have been).
And, if a new pack of Nazis rise up to threaten Europe…let ‘em have it.