While his colleagues at the New York Times have been obsessing about Sarah Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy, Dexter Filkins has actually been engaging in serious reporting. Earlier this week Filkins wrote a piece on American commanders formally returning responsibility for keeping order in Anbar Province, once the heartland of the Sunni insurgency, to the Iraqi Army and police force. According to Filkins, “The ceremony capped one of the starkest turnabouts in the country since the war began five and a half years ago.”
Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic conducted an interesting interview with Filkins. Quoting the Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi, who in 2004 wrote, “The genie of terrorism, chaos and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country [Iraq] as a result of American mistakes, and it can’t be put back into a bottle,” Goldberg asked Filkins the genie was back in the bottle.
Yes, it is, for now. The progress here is remarkable. I came back to Iraq after being away for nearly two years, and honestly, parts of it are difficult for me to recognize. The park out in front of the house where I live–on the Tigris River–was a dead, dying, spooky place. It’s now filled with people–families with children, women walking alone, even at night. That was inconceivable in 2006. The Iraqis who are out there walking in the parks were making their own judgments that it is safe enough for them to go out for a walk. They’re voting with their feet. It’s a wonderful thing to see. Having said that, it’s pretty clear that the calm is very fragile. The calm is built on a series of arrangements that are not self-sustaining; indeed, some of which, like the Sunni Awakening, are showing signs of coming apart. So the genie is back in the bottle, but I’m not sure for how long.
There is one answer Filkins gave which strikes me as wrong. When asked if Iraq is a democracy, Filkins answered
I don’t think so. A democracy has many things: elections, compromise between groups, an atmosphere safe enough to discuss the issues of the day, and institutions that exist outside of government that are strong enough to allow all of the above to flourish–newspapers, political groups and the like. In Iraq, most of those things are in their infancy.
Filkins is right about what constitutes democracy. But Iraq actually has those things: elections, compromises between groups, newspapers and political parties, and more. He is correct that these things are in their infancy, and hence these achievements, while heartening and even unprecedented, are still fragile. And there are miles and miles to go before Iraq can be considered a strong, stable, flourishing society. But a young democracy is still a democracy. And while we cannot know the future, we can say with some confidence that Iraq is finally on the mend, something which was thought virtually impossible just 18 months ago.
