Now that things have calmed down in Iraq, it is no longer foremost on the minds of voters. And it is no longer on the hit list of The New York Times. Now it is safe for the Grey Lady to print stories about how we are succeeding there.
Two years ago, when I last stayed in Baghdad, Karada Mariam was like the whole of the city: shuttered, shattered, broken and dead.
Abu Nawas Park — I didn’t recognize that, either. By the time I had left the country in August 2006, the two-mile stretch of riverside park was a grim, spooky, deserted place, a symbol for the dying city that Baghdad had become.
These days, the same park is filled with people: families with children, women in jeans, women walking alone. Even the nighttime, when Iraqis used to cower inside their homes, no longer scares them. I can hear their laughter wafting from the park. At sundown the other day, I had to weave my way through perhaps 2,000 people. It was an astonishing, beautiful scene — impossible, incomprehensible, only months ago.
When I left Baghdad two years ago, the nation’s social fabric seemed too shredded to ever come together again. The very worst had lost its power to shock. To return now is to be jarred in the oddest way possible: by the normal, by the pleasant, even by hope....
But if this is not peace, it is not war, either — at least not the war I knew. When I left Iraq in the summer of 2006, after living three and a half years here following the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, I believed that evil had triumphed, and that it would be many years before it might be stopped. Iraq, filled with so many people living so close together, nurturing dark and unknowable grievances, seemed destined for a ghastly unraveling.
And now, in the late summer of 2008, comes the calm.
But as the nation turns their eyes towards economic crises, it is useful to remember who was right about Iraq and who was wrong.
So too with the current economic problem. McCain tried to muster support for regulation that would have revealed the problems at Fannie May and Freddie Mac three years ago, while Obama was silent on the issue: He was too busy taking campaign money from them. Clearly McCain was for sensible regulation before Obama (and his surrogates) said he was against it.
Obama, though, is still against the Surge.
