For Better, for Worse

...For each problem Iraqis and Americans need to figure out what combination of the Iraqi style and the American style makes sense...

...If there were a genuine insurgency, prospects for victory would be rather poor and distant...

...Are we faced with a popular insurgency against a foreign occupier —at least in the Sunni areas of the country...

...When Iraqis complain about American procedures, and want to do things their own way, the Americans often think the problem is that the Iraqis don't understand the reasons for doing it the American way, not appreciating that there may be a completely different way to do things...

...No one can be sure, but there is good reason to believe that when the Iraqis are given a proper chance to act against the Baathist terrorists—or when the gradual buildup of U.S...

...The differences between the CPA and Iraqis about how to get cement factories running are similar to the differences between the CPA and Iraqis about how to fight against the Baathists who are killing Americans and Iraqis, and to the differences over how to create a new Iraqi government...

...They did not realize how their critical words could be used by listeners who did not probe more deeply...

...In areas like Tikrit, the Baathist goons are known to all the locals, and their continued presence on the streets—as well as their continued ability to kill their enemies without response from the authorities—tells Iraqis that it is not safe to try to convince the Americans about who needs to be arrested...

...Neither side in the American debate considers that the problem might be in how the CPA is working with the Iraqis...

...The two immediate issues are the need to defeat the attacks by Baathists and foreign jihadists and the relationship between the occupation authority and the Iraqis...

...They therefore take a dim view of the Shiite majority, and the possibility that Iraq could become a model of democracy for the Arab world, as Turkey is for the larger Islamic world...

...While it will probably take somewhat longer to eliminate all terrorist organizations and pick up the foreign jihadists, the favorable outcome can easily become clear in six months—although the danger of a few big terror attacks is not likely to end...

...living with their weaknesses is part of the job...

...All the American diagnoses recognize that the Army needs better intelligence to defeat its Baathist and jihadist enemies, but that makes it sound as if intelligence were a commodity that you can find or buy or be given...

...Last month kids in their school uniforms were everywhere...

...they are reasons why improvement has not come faster and at a lower cost in lives, and why things could still get worse...

...Until now the CPA has not trusted any Iraqis enough to work with them in this way—although there are qualified Iraqis who have demonstrated their ability...

...The Iraqi political leadership wants to go to work the way the Sinjar factory was made to produce—relying on Iraqi know-how and a lot of Band-Aids...

...people with Arabic, police, and intelligence skills...

...Foreign service and CIA officers in the CPA, and their allies in Washington and London, reflect the viewpoint of the Sun-ni Arab dictators of the region, who want to preserve their regimes and whom the diplomats see as providing regional stability...

...They succeeded in producing cement again in three months...

...engineers under the CPA estimated that it would cost $23 million dollars and take a year to restart production from a cement factory in Sinjar, in the northwest corner of Iraq...

...Since this detention would not be punishment or conviction, it could err on the side of taking more men than necessary and releasing some in a few weeks after further questioning...

...A cement factory illustrates what the CPA is doing wrong and can fix...

...The reporting in the United States has obscured the ideological or policy basis for the internal division...

...Perhaps the key to success in the relationship is for each to try to be at least as conscious of its own weaknesses and its partner's strengths as it is of the opposite...

...Why can't all those troops overcome the small number of Baathist killers and foreign jihadists...

...These fundamental issues come to the surface in the difficulties between the CPA and the Iraqi leadership...

...Iraqis have mixed—often incoherent—but strong feelings about the American occupation...

...This leads the diplomats to want to encourage the primacy of the Sunnis (even Baathists and Arab Nationalists), who emphasize Israeli oppression of the Palestinians as the source of the region's woes...

...Such a process would have to be controlled by Iraqis who are in intimate cooperation with U.S...

...military intelligence efforts comes to fruition—the great bulk of the violence will be brought to a stop, Saddam Hussein will be captured or killed, and there will be sharp improvement in the political situation in Iraq...

...Why are there so many attacks on Americans and their Iraqi helpers...

...This intelligence process would be greatly aided by the arrest and temporary detention of many hundreds or perhaps even several thousand known Baathists who were part of Saddam's security or intelligence forces...

...The CPA is stuck with its partners...

...The overwhelming majority of Iraqis are glad the Americans came and don't want them to leave soon—although they also want an Iraqi government with real power now...

...The reality of the relationship at the top is that the Iraqis and the CPA are married to each other—each is dependent on the other, each needs the other's agreement and cooperation...

...forces are only gradually learning how to find out who they are...

...policy, despite L. Paul Bremer's loyalty to the policies of Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush...

...The result would be to remove most of the men whom ordinary citizens fear, demonstrating that the government is determined to use sufficient force to neutralize the Baathist threat and knows what it is doing...

...The Iraqis aren't angry that we came to remove Saddam...

...That cannot happen until the CPA understands that they and the Iraqis are equal partners and resists the temptation to explain lack of agreement by criticizing the Iraqi representatives...

...But this deep divergence within U.S...

...They could easily become more dangerous...

...So it is easy for reporters to find whatever Iraqi perspectives they expect...

...So far the American opponents of democracy in Iraq have not succeeded, because the Iraqi tendencies, in reaction to Saddam, are so much in the other direction...

...As a practical matter they each have equal power, however the formal ties are defined...

...The CPA thinks it knows better...

...Major political and psychological benefits will be gained by establishing an Iraqi provisional government, but by itself it will not create the right relationship between Iraqi leadership and the CPA...

...position in Iraq...

...But only the Americans have the authority to arrest them, and the U.S...

...field forces, working with growing numbers of Iraqi civil defense and police forces, will be able to do the job—and we can't know yet which approach would now be quicker...

...That said, my perception is that the most commonly heard explanations for our continuing troubles—that Iraqis are against us, or have turned against us, and want us out—is wrong...

...Or that the lack of greater popular support for the Iraqi Governing Council might result from the perception that it has little real power and is not respected by the Americans—a classic chicken or egg dilemma...

...It is also possible that the current process of improvement in intelligence gathering by the U.S...

...These people must be protected...

...But so far the occupation of Iraq has had important net positive results, and we should expect a successful outcome...

...Typically they express all of their contradictory views passionately...

...Iraqis I spoke to—including one who had just come back after several years in Saudi Arabia and started his own think tank—typically opened with negative remarks about other Iraqis but when questioned turned out to be supporters with quibbles, not opponents...

...The CPA believes that Iraqis' failure to do what they are being urged to do is the result of the weaknesses of the Iraqi leadership—and have talked about the need to improve or to replace that leadership...

...This operation should not be evaluated with the standards suitable for a punishment and justice procedure...

...policy is persistent and has already made the president's goals more difficult to achieve...

...there is a war going on, and it requires procedures appropriate for defeating the Baathist war against the Iraqi population...

...How long it will take the Iraqis to overcome all the human frailties that make real democracy so difficult to achieve is another question...

...Since the attacks are not related to a popular movement, we should expect that they will be defeated when the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) learns how to work effectively with the Iraqis, or as the cumulative effect of the U.S...

...President Bush's opponents believe that poor performance by the Iraqis is the result of the wrongheadedness of the U.S...

...It requires Iraqis sitting regularly in Tikrit and the other cities in the Sunni triangle...

...The CPA's job is to work with the Iraqi leaders who exist...

...Bremer's headquarters and the administration in Washington this fall, before the decision to speed up the creation of a provisional government...

...And the Sunni sympathizers may yet succeed in derailing the effort to build a free Iraq—all in service to what they see as an effort to save our country from the dangers of following unrealistic visions...

...But of course the Iraqi way may have advantages as well as disadvantages that the Americans are less able to understand than vice versa...

...The CPA began the paperwork to allocate the money and start work...

...While the CPA has accomplished a great deal in a short time, it is still seeking the best way to work with Iraqis, and has decided to make a major change in its approach—creating a provisional government, as the Iraqis had originally proposed, by next June...

...The apostles of failure can't believe that small changes in administration tactics might produce dramatically better results—because that would mean that Bush was not wrong in his decision to remove Saddam...

...Fortunately, much of the interaction with ordinary Iraqis is conducted by military field forces, who have become quite effective...

...When the Americans learn to work with Iraqis well enough to arrest most of the right people, they will be flooded with help even from Sunnis and Tikritis...

...What then is the problem...

...The other is that different parts of the U.S...

...and they must be authorized and equipped to take prompt action to protect their sources and to arrest enemies while information is fresh...

...A decision to work with Iraqis in this way could be implemented before there is a provisional government (and could be stalled even after there is a provisional government...

...Of course the plant wasn't working at full capacity, and it was a maintenance nightmare that would soon require more investment...

...Which is to say that the CPA is entitled to claim a measure of success...

...government have addressed the task with different assumptions and different goals, each trying to prevent the other from achieving its objectives, and the president has never made an effective decision between the two approaches...

...When I needed bath sandals my driver and I walked along one of the main streets that was full of Iraqis shopping, eating, and socializing after dark, and in a few minutes looked in more than half a dozen stores before I found a size 44 pair (apparently Iraqis have small feet...

...They don't want us to go home because of the Iraqis who are killed or mistreated when we try to protect ourselves, or because they resent the presence of American tanks or Humvee convoys with guns at the ready...

...BY MAX SINGER Baghdad To get to Baghdad in May, I rode 10 hours in a battered taxi from the Turkish border...

...The mistakes are not explanations for failure...

...The CPA has trouble believing that their understanding of Iraq's needs is not as astute as that of the Iraqis', or that their lack of success in establishing good relations with Iraqi leaders might be their own fault...

...One is that the physical and human task of building a new Iraq is genuinely difficult...

...Of course this advice should be easier for the CPA to take than for the Iraqis, because the CPA has a commander with a great deal of authority and the Iraqi side is a political process still being established...

...They are also more or less equally competent—because their very different strengths and weaknesses roughly balance each other...

...They aren't shooting at us because the CPA was slow in restoring electric power...

...Zones of Turmoil (with Aaron Wildavsky...

...When I returned last month I flew on a Jordanian Royal Wings daily charter flight from Amman, and entered through the refurbished main terminal of the Baghdad International Airport...

...Fortunately the evidence indicates that there is no insurgency in Iraq...

...As reported in the Washington Post on November 10, U.S...

...Their views are the main source for most of the reporting that is not actively anti-American, and they very much influence the implementation of U.S...

...The problems in fighting the Baathists and foreign jihadists are tactical, not political, and don't stem from a lack of resources (although there continue to be too few Max Singer is a founder and senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and the author of The Real World Order: Zones of Peace...

...The Iraqis then cleaned out the offices and figured out that they had $240,000 worth of stored cement and cash in old accounts, which they used to improvise repairs in the factory...

...Note the criticism of the Iraqi Governing Council emanating from Amb...

...Much evidence suggests that as the CPA continues to improve its cooperation with the Iraqis, not only will there be more cement factories working, there will be fewer Americans blown up, and there may even be a good start toward a legitimate Iraqi government that will enable the Iraqi communities to live with each other in a free and peaceful country...

...In May life was just beginning to return to Baghdad's streets, and schools were not yet open...

...There are serious problems in Iraq...

...But while the bureaucratic process was grinding, the local military commander gave the Iraqi plant manager $10,000 in seed money to begin working...

...military response to the challenge becomes decisive...

...But it worked...

...They don't see us as imperial conquerors—^although many do think we came to protect the oil...

...The intelligence that is needed is more like a process...

...There are a small number of Baathists with loads of money and guns and sophisticated training in covert violence...

...they have to work together even if those partners are vain or selfish...

...forces...

...Yet over this same time, the average number of attacks on Americans and their allies increased from 5 or 6 to more than 30 per day...

...Of course there are problems on the Iraqi side of the relationship too...

...The short answer to the question of what conclusions can be drawn from the conflicting reports coming from Baghdad is that the fundamental issue is Iraqi opinion, politics, and behavior, and that so far the Iraqis are going in the right direction, although certainly with many exceptions and plenty of problems ahead...

...they must be part of an Iraqi organization that knows how to check information they receive and integrate it with a systematic understanding of the enemy...

...There are two underlying reasons why the coalition isn't doing better...