The Last Day of the Iraq War

An Iraqi police SUV stays parked across the entrance to the market in Mahmudiyah, about 10 miles south of Baghdad on the highway to Najaf. The market road through town has been closed to traffic for years, but drivers seem OK with the long, bumpy detour. Better to endure the inconvenience than to risk more car bombings or another attack like the explosives-and-gunfire rampage that killed roughly 70 people in one half-hour in July 2006. By late 2007, attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces in the area had slowed but still occurred about 15 times a week. Just last March, the town endured nearly a week of urban warfare in which roughly 2,000 Iraqi troops and 300 Americans battled a few hundred Shiite militiamen and their neighbors, who joined the shootout. Things are quieter now—although no one wants to take chances in the area that's been known since 2004 as the Triangle of Death.

Bombs explode occasionally, but mostly without hurting anyone. Awful exceptions remain, like the Jan. 2 suicide bombing that killed roughly 20 people gathered at a sheik's home in Yousifiyah, 10 miles from Mahmudiyah.

But thousands of Iraqi soldiers, police and tribal adjuncts stand guard at checkpoints all along the area's roads, on the lookout for wanted men and possible bombers as rows of cars pass between low concrete barriers. The Iraqis have tried to make some of the stops less grim by sticking plastic flowers to the gray slabs. Some checkpoints are painted with slogans like BE RESPECTFUL AND YOU WILL BE TREATED RESPECTFULLY.

You don't see many Americans now. It's a striking change from about a year ago, when troops scoured the marketplace for wanted killers and helicopters made twice- weekly assaults against Al Qaeda hideouts on the town's outskirts. But in recent months U.S. troops have pulled out of the neighborhood combat outposts they used to share with Iraqi forces, and their numbers have thinned to a third of what they were across the triangle in early 2008. Americans still pass through occasionally to check in with their Iraqi counterparts, attend local council meetings and do what they can about rebuilding the ravaged economy. Otherwise the Iraqis are mostly left to muddle along on their own.

Until now it was impossible to predict with confidence what the end of the war would look like in Iraq. But a clear picture could be emerging here in Mahmudiyah. The outcome is hardly what the occupation's supporters wanted, but it's too late for anyone to do much about that, under the deadlines set by the new U.S.-Iraqi security agreement. By the middle of this year, American combat forces must complete their official withdrawal from population centers. Security duties will be left to Iraqi forces, although U.S. military trainers and advisers will remain. As of Dec. 31, 2011, three years from now, all U.S. troops are to be out of the country. Meanwhile they still have their hands full in the northern city of Mosul, where insurgents and jihadists have dug in for another showdown, and Iraqis are bracing for more violence in the run-up to elections at the end of this month.

In Mahmudiyah the drawdown began almost a year ago. As hard as the Americans tried to fix the place, it's still nothing to brag about. The economy, although improving, remains crippled. Public services are practically nonexistent. Courts and government offices are open, but schools lack working toilets, and teachers are so bad that parents scrape money together for private tutors. Sewage floods some side streets, and telephone landlines fail as often as not. The big government hospital is chronically short of medical supplies; late last month, a man scoured the town's drugstores for surgical thread because the hospital had none for his wife, who was undergoing a Caesarean delivery. "The military is, in some cases, the only government people see," says Maj. John Baker, who advised Iraqi troops in rural areas near Mahmudiyah until late 2008. By normal standards the town is a mess—but it's less dangerous than it was, and at this point that's about the best anyone can expect.

The situation is summed up in a phrase you hear among American combat troops and trainers: "Iraqi good enough." The term expresses their resignation—realism, they'd call it—about the limits of what America can accomplish in Iraq. They say it when an Iraqi Army unit has no choice but to buy fuel for its Humvees on the private market because Iraq's military-supply system is so corrupt and inefficient. Or when the persistent shortage of capable leaders forces Iraqi battalions to function with only half the number of officers they require. Or when Iraqi soldiers fall apart in a senior officer's absence because that's the way it goes in a top-down society. The concept has spread to American Embassy staffers, who invoke it when speaking of the near-impossible task of reforming the decrepit old welfare-state economy. "Good enough" may not live up to Americans' hopes for Iraq, but at this point it describes the place we're likely to leave behind in 2011—if things stay on track. "It's a hell of a lot better than I thought we were going to get four years ago fighting in Anbar, or two years ago in a civil war," says counterinsurgency expert John Nagl. "The high side may not be that high, but the costs of failure are severe."