Lost in Our Own Little World

Two days after a lethal car bomb exploded outside the Mount Lebanon Hotel in downtown Baghdad last month, I sat down for tea with an Iraqi poet near the capital's famous open-air book market. In between jokes delivered with a mock Egyptian accent, he laid out his theory of the hotel bombing: The U.S. military staged the violence, he posited, in order to justify its continuing occupation of Iraq.

A few hours later, I stood in a city square as an emissary of the young Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr addressed a crowd of 1,500 that had gathered to protest the U.S.-approved transitional administrative law. Sadr's spokesman was equally skeptical about the U.S. presence, saying that the Army would stay on at the invitation of the "Governed Council" -- his way of characterizing the U.S.-appointed 25-member Iraqi Governing Council created last July to give Iraqis some feeling of limited national sovereignty.

The poet summed up the situation in his nation this way: "Surreal! Iraq is a surreal country."

But upon returning from Baghdad, I find that America feels a little surreal as well.

Here, the debate about Iraq is almost completely focused on what the war has or has not done for the United States. Two concerns we all feel: How long will our soldiers' lives be at risk? Are Americans safer from the threat of terrorist attack? Other concerns seem a little abstract: Will U.S. military readiness be sapped by the construction of 14 "enduring" bases in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins? What course of action best demonstrates the firmness of our will? Though these questions spark much disagreement among politicians and policymakers, a bipartisan consensus holds that the U.S. cannot cut and run from Iraq because its standing as a world power would suffer grievously.

Our self-centered national debate starts with the assumption that Iraqis want the U.S. military to stay, as Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said after the brutal slayings of four American security contractors in Fallujah, "until the job is done." Because there are few Iraqi voices in the American media, the public has precious little ability to fact-check this conventional wisdom. The White House cites a series of polls, most recently one conducted by Oxford Research International for the BBC and other broadcasters, showing that a majority of Iraqis believe they are better off today than under Saddam Hussein. The administration assumes this must also mean that Iraqis welcome the occupation. But Iraq is full of reasons to doubt this optimistic view.

Quite apart from the spread of violent resistance beyond the so-called Sunni triangle into the mostly Shiite areas of the holy city of Najaf and the sprawling Baghdad slum known as Sadr City, the bumbling course of the occupation has turned hearts and minds firmly against the Coalition Provisional Authority. One afternoon in March, I went looking for a group of Iraqi families that planned to hold a demonstration to burn the promissory notes they had been given as compensation for sons and brothers wrongly killed by coalition troops. Not only were the compensation amounts small, but months after the shooting incidents, the families still had not been paid. They had completely lost faith in U.S. intentions, I heard. But there were no Iraqis at the protest site. When a U.S. tank and armored personnel carrier appeared -- in order "to protect" (the officer in charge told me) the bereaved Iraqis, the nervous families had departed en masse upon the arrival of their "protectors."

On another afternoon, passing the so-called Assassins' Gate that guards the entrance to the CPA's "Green Zone," formerly the grounds of the main presidential palace, I saw a young day laborer wave at the soldier in the watchtower. "Warm greetings to Saddam!" he yelled, as his friends burst out laughing.