The Last Day of the Iraq War

Success seemed at hand as I watched a Marine convoy roll through Baghdad on April 9, 2003. The moment ended almost immediately. Stores and restaurants that had stayed open all during the invasion had suddenly bricked up their windows, and an orgy of lawlessness erupted. Amid it all, reporters at the Republican Palace were given a poster-size proclamation from the then Lt. Gen. David McKiernan vowing to make Iraq "a model of success to the international community." Few Iraqis saw it. I assured my Iraqi friends that the anarchy would subside when the lights were on again and reconstruction began. The looting did stop after nothing was left to steal, but other things got worse. Even so, U.S. commanders and spokesmen spun every insurgent attack as the death throes of a desperate minority, rather than a rising wave of resistance. That state of stubborn denial left American troops vulnerable to bombings in canvas-covered Humvees and embassy personnel facing rocket attacks in flimsy trailers.

Wishful thinking prevailed on the civilian side, too. Economic planners were convinced they could rescue Iraq from its welfare-state paralysis. They set out to privatize state factories, although it soon became obvious that few of the bloated dinosaurs could survive a free market. They wrote laws inviting foreign investment that never came close to the levels they sought and most Iraqis opposed. Some looked to post-Soviet Eastern Europe as a model for revival. When U.S. diplomats spearheaded the International Monetary Fund's requirement that Iraq reduce state fuel subsidies, Iraqis were outraged. It didn't help matters when a commercial counselor at the embassy introduced the plan in December 2005 by telling Iraqi journalists, "No pain, no gain." I asked one Iraqi what he thought of that. He said 30 years of Saddam was enough pain.

The turning point came in late 2006. Millions of Iraqis had fled their homes, driven off by sectarian kidnappings and killings. Four months of U.S. and Iraqi Army efforts had failed to quell the bloodshed in Baghdad. It was the then Maj. Gen. William Caldwell IV who finally broke the U.S. military's code of public silence on the disastrous state of things. An earnest man, he liked to say he took his assignment as a chance to see the birth of a new democracy born in a country of great wealth and potential. But on Oct. 19, 2006, a glum Caldwell stood behind the podium in the press center and carefully sounded what amounted to an all-out alarm after three years of gung-ho military dissembling: "The violence is indeed disheartening."

America's expectations have plunged. Officials on the ground now envision an Iraq roughly like other nondemocratic states in the Middle East. The government will no doubt be repressive—not as bad as when Saddam Hussein was in charge, but even now Iraq's jails hold thousands of prisoners who have been held for months without hearing the charges against them. Corruption is rampant, in part because the state isn't strong enough to haul the biggest wrongdoers into court without touching off a rebellion. Residents of Mahmudiyah sarcastically call their mayor's neighborhood Owja, after Saddam's hometown—the lights stay on there even when the power is out everywhere else. And Tehran already has far more influence in the new Iraq than it did under Saddam.

If Iraq can defend its own borders, keep the oil flowing and not provide a refuge for international terrorists, that's what now counts as an acceptable outcome. Sometimes the newfound pragmatism verges on the heartless—as when U.S. officials refer to "tolerable" levels of violence. Translation: bombings and assassinations, as long as hostilities don't spiral out of control. Talking privately about "Iraqi good enough," one senior American adviser (he couldn't have spoken so bluntly if identified) gave me this definition: "Another way of saying 'we're out of here'."

Iraqis know "good enough" from the inside out. They have an old saying: "A man who has been through death is happy just to have a fever." Iraqi life is all about workarounds and adjustments and adapting to inevitabilities. Water pressure in the city mains is so weak that people need household pumps to get anything from their taps. One high-end model is nicknamed the Thief because it leaves nothing for the neighbors' smaller devices. There's no end in sight for the rough times. American commanders have encouraged at least one major U.S. company to put that fact to intelligent use. The electrical-equipment giant Cummins Inc. has plans to create a distribution and service center not far from Mahmudiyah, in the town of Iskandariyah. The company intends to train Iraqis to repair the mobile generators that U.S. troops and local neighborhoods rely on in place of the country's decrepit power grid. I recall an Iraqi who told me early in the war that we would have been smarter to come with thousands of generators. After all, he said, we managed to bring all those tanks. But in those days the Coalition's only thought was to get big industrial power plants up and running. The grandiose projects fell way behind schedule and are still plagued with problems.

One of the architects of the Mahmudiyah drawdown was the area's U.S. brigade commander at the time, Col. Dominic J. Caraccilo of the 101st Airborne. We met before he rotated home this past November. Between his two tours in Iraq, he had coauthored a book: "Achieving Victory in Iraq: Countering an Insurgency." Most American officers avoid the V word, preferring not to raise the implicit question of whether the war was worth the lives of 4,100 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Caraccilo's book doesn't really define victory except to say it needs to be redefined. But one of the chapters is titled "The Good Enough Solution," and that's pretty much what he made in Mahmudiyah in the course of adapting to a troop reduction that was thrust upon him by redeployments to other parts of Iraq.