THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ VI

What chance has Bush given the starving people of North Korea? What chance has Bush given the people of the Sudan? What chance has Bush given the Palestinians? . . .

How very foolish of me.

No less foolish than your mathmatical nonsense, of course . . .

It was at the beginning of May last year that I first arrived in a free
Iraq. It had been three weeks since the fall of the Saddam statue in
Baghdad's Firdous Square, but Iraqis still sought out pale faces on the
street to whom they might offer "thanks" for the liberation. One man was all
smiles as he showed off scars he said he received at Abu Ghraib, then
notorious only as Saddam's chamber of horrors. To take a ride in an American
humvee was to risk not a roadside bomb but a tired arm from waving back at
beaming children. And as I traveled throughout Baghdad and beyond over the
next few weeks with my driver/translator -- who only a month or so earlier
had been a MiG pilot in the Iraqi air force -- the last thing on my mind was
kidnapping or the name of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Two weeks ago I returned to Iraq with Paul Wolfowitz and incoming coalition
commander George Casey, who barnstormed the country discussing security and
the political transition with U.S. forces and the incoming Iraqi government.
A year of car bombings and assassinations has changed a lot of things for
the worse. Yet as sovereignty returned to Iraqis Monday, I found myself in
some ways more optimistic than ever.

Why? Because if the past year couldn't drive Iraq into chaos -- and despite
what you see on the event-driven nightly news reports, it hasn't come
close -- probably nothing will. Iraqis have weathered a diabolical campaign
of sectarian terror aimed at pitting them against each other; an attempt by
a renegade cleric to turn Iraq's Shiite majority against the coalition; and
some serious missteps by the occupying powers. If more Americans are having
second thoughts about whether the war was worth it, there's little such
sentiment in Baghdad. "Saddam Hussein's regime was a car bomb every day,"
says Barham Salih, the new deputy prime minister. "We can all complain about
the uncertainty, but we cannot forget about where we came from." Interim
President Ghazi Yawer concurs, describing the past year as "90% good" and
only "10% bad" -- "we got rid of the most vicious regime."

American commanders, too, paint a cautiously optimistic picture. "The theme
of this briefing is that the glass is half-full. Things are heading in the
right direction," one of them told Mr. Wolfowitz, offering a report similar
to the ones we heard from other military divisions as we crisscrossed the
country in Blackhawks and C-130s. The bottom line: Attacks on coalition
forces remain way down since violence flared in early April, and Iraqis
themselves increasingly are coming forward with valuable intelligence. One
American unit reported that whereas some 98% of attacks in their area had
been against coalition forces, 20% to 40% are now against fellow Iraqis.

This is tragic, but it is not indicative of a popular "insurgency" or
"resistance" movement gaining strength. The threat remains Islamist and
Baathist terrorists whose only hope is to intimidate those who'd help build
a new Iraq.

Yet Iraqis continue to line up for service, even outside security-force
recruiting stations that have been frequent objects of attack. One coalition
civilian staffer points out that some 2,000 groups have registered to be
legally recognized NGOs, and that there were 1,800 applications for just
seven slots on the commission to oversee elections. "Iraqis are trying hard
to make it themselves and they're impatient with our slowness," says the
official, who has previous democracy-building experience in the Balkans.
"Iraqis are way more advanced than the Bosnians" in terms of taking the
initiative, he adds.

The most hopeful sign of recent months is how decisively Iraq's Shiite
majority rejected Muqtada al-Sadr's April bid to turn them against the
coalition and away from the electoral path. Sadr's men were routed by a
combination of local intelligence and brilliant soldiering by Maj. Gen.
Martin Dempsey's First Armored Division. The division's commanders say that
what's left of Sadr's Mehdi Army actually has turned in its heavy weapons
and that the current cease-fire appears to be genuine.

That cease-fire, by the way, was brokered with a lot of help from Ahmed
Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress the First Armored credits with having
provided valuable intelligence and loyal men for the Iraqi Civil Defense
Corps. That view from the ground squares with the Chalabi I've known for
some years, and is a different picture than the one painted by his enemies
in Washington bureaucracies and New York editorial offices.

The big problem remains the one that touched off April's troubles: Fallujah.
Located only 30 miles or so west of Baghdad along the critical highway
joining the Iraqi capital with Amman in Jordan, the city is still a factory
of Baathist and foreign Islamist terror. Car bombings, which all but stopped
during the Marines' April siege of the city, have returned with a vengeance,
and Fallujah appears to be an operational hub for kidnappers as well. Lt.
Gen. Mohammed Latif is a local and commander of the so-called Fallujah
Brigade, and his heart appears to be in right place: "When coalition forces
arrived in Iraq, 99% of the people were happy to see them." But he obviously
has little control over the situation in the city, and his "strategy" seems
little more than a hope that the various factions of bad guys therein will
fight each other to a standstill.

A word is also in order about the since-departed Iraq Czar L. Paul Bremer.
Conventional wisdom seems all but solidified on the point that his major
mistakes were overzealous de-Baathification and disbanding the Iraqi Army.
In truth, Iraq's conscript forces disbanded themselves and de-Baathification
has been overwhelmingly popular with at least 80% (the Shiites and Kurds) of
Iraqis.

The real problem is that Mr. Bremer behaved as if he were planning a
five-year regency, moving slowly on building new Iraqi security forces and
brooking no indigenous challenge to his authority. Meeting the Wolfowitz
press pool, he spent an unseemly amount of his time badmouthing the "work et
hic" of the outgoing Governing Council, two of whose courageous members were
assassinated for serving their country. His questionable commitment to the
truth -- whether it be on the actual state of electricity supplies, or
denying any role in the universally condemned raid on Mr. Chalabi's house --
also did not go unnoticed among Iraqis.

But despite it all there remains every chance that come January Iraqis will
hold the freest elections in recent Middle Eastern history. This is a
testament to the character of Iraqis themselves, and to the unsung heroism,
judgment and cultural understanding displayed by 99.9% of coalition troops
there. "Very little of that has been reported and it's unfair to Americans,
whose kids are doing a great job," volunteered Deputy Prime Minister Salih.
On the plane ride home, Mr. Wolfowitz added a similar coda: "I've stopped
pretending that I come out to raise their [the troops'] morale because
inevitably they raise mine."

The Kerry Parade:



Not enough sense to come in out of the rain.

Can you imagine what Prezdint BringEmOn would have done if it started to rain on him at a rally?

First he would have ordered the Secret Service to hold an umbrella over his head.

Then he would have run for the limo.

But not if he had to step on any wet ground to get there.

The SS would have carried him, fireman's style, so he wouldn't have to get any mud on his shoes.

Yesterday, Bush told a crowd of West Virginians, "We still believe, on America's 228th birthday, that freedom has the power to change the world."

As he spoke, two people wearing anti-Bush T-shirts were "removed" from the crowd.

The choice gets clearer every day.