The Danger of Defeat

Kirkuk, Iraq - When you journey abroad, news from home tends to arrive in disjointed snippets. But rarely has such a tidbit seemed as unrooted in reality as the comment of President Bush that reached here a day after a series of devastating bombings in Baghdad. The attacks, Bush said, resulted from the progress of the occupation and the desperation of the insurgents.

Bush is right that progress is occurring in some places, including this city north of Baghdad. But even here progress is fitful, and dependent on Iraqi confidence that the Americans will not bail out anytime soon. The president's implication that the latest well-coordinated attacks are a last gasp of a desperate opposition seems so much a product of wishful thinking that it can only undermine that confidence, even as it continues to mislead Americans about the difficulty of defeating a ruthless insurgency.

Here's the reality: Insurgents are waging a strategic and malevolently clever campaign that is achieving, in its terms, considerable success. The kind of progress that Bush seeks cannot be accomplished under current conditions of danger and uncertainty. What Iraqis need as they emerge from decades of stifling repression is a richness of contact with the world and a faith that change -- true, structural change -- is possible. Both of those -- the contact and the faith -- are undermined, deliberately and successfully, by terrorism aimed at any vulnerable point of intersection between cooperating Iraqis and well-wishing foreigners.

Saddam Hussein isolated his people in a prison of secret-police-enforced fear. Now fear of terrorism is isolating them in a different way. The charitable, human rights and democracy-building volunteers who should be streaming into the country are for the most part staying away. That further exposes the official occupiers, who in turn are forced to distance themselves from the people they are here to help.

Nothing symbolizes that distance more sadly than the Baghdad presidential palace-turned-occupation headquarters. Inside the vast complex, once-echoing hallways teem with soldiers and civilians dedicated to the noble job of reconstruction. But they work behind so many layers of security -- behind walls and tanks and signs threatening "DEADLY FORCE" and approach roads turned into slaloms of concrete barriers -- that the palace must seem to ordinary Iraqis, if not as frightening as in the past, certainly as remote. When senior occupation officials do venture out, it is often in convoys bristling with armed guards.

The mood in this city of 800,000 is far less tense. A representative council, chosen by elites of each ethnic group, meets on Mondays to debate and make policy. Mayor Abdul Rahman Mustafa, who was elected by the council, lavishly praises the work of U.S. troops and insists they must remain.

And when you meet Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, who commands 27,000 troops in a vast area of Iraq, including this city, it is easy to understand the mayor's confidence. Troops of the 4th Infantry Division and the 173rd Airborne Brigade are constantly out and about, averaging 10 raids a day against insurgents and almost as many meetings with religious, political, civic and tribal leaders. More Iraqis are coming forward with useful tips about bad guys, the general says, and his troops are drying up the flows of money used to finance attacks on Americans. Meeting with a small group of journalists and academics yesterday, the general echoed Bush's assessment of overall progress and agreed that the Baghdad attacks may be "a sign of a little bit of desperation." Yet here, too, the picture is mixed. The number of attacks against Americans is up this month over last. Translators working for the occupiers receive threats, oil workers are shot at. The resisters' organization "has gotten a little bit better," the general says, though still locally, not as a national network. And Saddam Hussein continues to evade capture, quite likely in this sector, because too many people still fear him -- and question the staying power of the United States.

How long will that stay have to be? "It could be six months, it could be six years," Odierno says. "If the progress continues at a slow pace, it's going to be years. If it picks up -- then maybe months." Odierno says he remains optimistic about Iraq's future, because most Iraqis want this project to succeed. And Bush, yesterday offering a somewhat more realistic assessment of the challenges, vowed that "we're not leaving." But such vows are not sufficient. There is a danger that slow progress will shift into reverse as Iraqis grow impatient and the insurgency becomes more skilled. The occupiers would have to isolate themselves further, while American clamoring for an "exit strategy" would further erode Iraqi confidence. There is a danger, in other words, of defeat -- one that would be devastating both for the vast majority of Iraqis, who do not want Saddam Hussein's henchmen to return, and for America's safety and well-being.

fredhiatt@washpost.com