In Iraq, the Momentary Good News and the Depressingly, Lastingly Bad

[babylonsister]

In Iraq, the Momentary Good News and the Depressingly, Lastingly Bad
pm carpenter


As any watchful pessimist knows, every silver lining has a cloud. And the "good news" emerging from Iraq's internal rumblings is just such a case of "Brace yourself."

This morning the New York Times laid on thickly what's right with Baghdad these days -- probably to the right's everlasting chagrin, since, as it reminds us daily, the Times doesn't do such things. In a boffo tribute to snapshot reporting, veteran Iraq journalists Damien Cave and Alissa Rubin explain the hopeful here and now in "Baghdad Starts to Exhale as Security Improves," a headline whose positive mood pretty much blankets the story.

"The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real," says the Times, after noting, as one example, the "cooking by a sunlit window" performed by one repatriated wife and mother. "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."

For Americans at home, no matter how virulently anti-Iraq war they may be, the easing tensions and bloodshed in Baghdad are welcome news. Any respite from the daily slaughter that defined the city just a few months ago is a definite good, no matter how it was achieved, or who achieved it. No Iraq family deserves, and no American family delights in, the bloody mayhem and displacements ignited by a wrongheaded "liberation."

Yet -- and here come the clouds -- the good news is almost certainly temporary. And, extending the above point made on Americans' partisan differences, despite what right-wing pro-warrers might think, that doleful prospect is as depressing for the antiwar crowd as it is for them. Again, no one relishes the human fallout of a brutal civil war; but ethnic, sectarian and geopolitical realities on the ground in Iraq are still realities -- and they remain every bit as potentially brutal. The antiwar bloc just isn't as blind to them.

The Times only briefly suggested that optimism should be dispensed with a huge grain of caution. "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" -- and this is the huge part -- "the depth and sustainability of the changes remain open to question."

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