Iraqis Regaining Confidence
A poll of Iraqis done for the BBC and other news organizations has gotten some attention today. The BBC headlines, "Poll suggests Iraqis 'optimistic,'" and that's a fair lead. As always, though, the details of the survey, available here, contain much more that is of interest.
Respondents' answers are most reliable, I think, when they are talking about their own experience and observation. Thus, the single most important question, in my view, is number 9, "Would you rate today’s security situation in the village/neighbourhood where you live as very good, quite good, quite bad, or very bad?" Currently, 62% rate conditions either "very good" (20%) or "quite good" (42%). This represents a significant increase from February 2007 (47%) and August 2007 (43%). It's almost exactly the same as in 2005 (61%). This appears to be more confirmation of the success of the surge.
This is supported further by Question No. 10, which asks, "In the past six months has the security situation in this neighbourhood/ village become better, become worse, or stayed about the same?" 46% say "better," compared with only 17% who say "worse."
Similar patterns of response document improving economic conditions in Iraq.
Iraq's government is a frequent whipping-boy here in the U.S., but, for what it's worth, Iraqis rate their government better than Americans rate ours. Currently, 43% of Iraqis say their government is doing either a "very good job" or "quite a good job."
The responses that have to do with the U.S. presence in Iraq seem mostly meaningless. Most Iraqis have answered questions about the U.S. presence about the same, through good times and bad. Their answers are sometimes contradictory; thus, by 61% to 27%, respondents say that the presence of U.S. troops is making the security situation worse. Yet only 38% want American forces to leave now. The majority want us to stay until security is restored or the Iraqi government is stronger.
The last point worth mentioning is that this survey has been conducted periodically, back to 2004. Viewed over time, the survey data tell a consistent story. In the first two years after the 2003 war, good progress was being made. Thus, as of 2005, 61% said the security situation in their neighborhood was "very good" or "quite good." Similarly, 46% said the supply of electricity was "very good" or "quite good," and fully 70% said their families' economic situations were "very good" or "quite good."
In February 2006, the Samarra Mosque was bombed, probably by al Qaeda, in an effort to set off sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni Iraqis. Al Qaeda's strategy worked. Not only did sectarian violence spread, but al Qaeda itself sent substantial numbers of foreign jihadists to Iraq to carry out terrorist attacks. The results were disastrous. By August 2007, only 37% of Iraqis said their families' economic conditions were "very good" or "quite good," and only 43% termed the security situation where they lived "very good" or "quite good."
News coverage of Iraq has been unremittingly negative from 2003 to the present. This has tended to obscure the real pattern of what has happened there: steady improvement for more than two years following the war, followed by steeply worsening conditions starting in 2006, succeeded by the significant improvement that has attended the surge.
These days, it is fashionable to bash the "Rumsfeld strategy" for Iraq. Characteristically, the Bush administration makes no serious effort to defend what it did in Iraq between 2003 and 2006. In reality, the facts on the ground suggest that the "Rumsfeld strategy," which emphasized minimizing American casualties while training Iraqi forces to effect a handover of control, was working until it was sabotaged by the sectarian violence that was triggered by al Qaeda and accelerated rapidly in 2006.
One can argue that we were too slow to respond to those worsening conditions, and that's probably true. On the whole, though, it is fair to characterize the surge as having put Iraq back on the successful trajectory that prevailed from 2003 through 2005. That, at least, is what the Iraqis' survey responses tell us.
