Iran Top Threat To Iraq, U.S. Says
Focus on Al-Qaeda Now Diminishing
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 12, 2008; A01

Last week's violence in Basra and Baghdad has convinced the Bush administration that actions by Iran, and not al-Qaeda, are the primary threat inside Iraq, and has sparked a broad reassessment of policy in the region, according to senior U.S. officials.

Evidence of an increase in Iranian weapons, training and direction for the Shiite militias that battled U.S. and Iraqi security forces in those two cities has fixed new U.S. attention on what Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates yesterday called Tehran's "malign" influence, the officials said.

The intensified focus on Iran coincides with diminished emphasis on al-Qaeda in Iraq as the leading justification for an ongoing U.S. military presence in Iraq.

In congressional hearings this week, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus said the U.S. military has driven al-Qaeda from Baghdad, Anbar province and central Iraq, and he depicted the group as now largely concentrated in a reduced territory around the northern city of Mosul.

During their Washington visit, Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker barely mentioned al-Qaeda in Iraq but spoke extensively of Iran.

With "al-Qaeda in retreat and disarray" in Iraq, said one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record, "we see other obstacles that were under the waterline more clearly. . . . The Iranian-armed militias are now the biggest threat to internal order."

Partly in response to advice from Petraeus and Crocker, the administration has initiated an interagency assessment of what is known about Iranian activities and intentions, how to combat them and how to capitalize on them. The review stems from an internal conclusion, following last week's fighting, that the administration lacked a comprehensive understanding and a sophisticated approach.

President Bush reiterated yesterday that if Iran continues to help militias in Iraq, "then we'll deal with them," saying in an interview with ABC News that "we're learning more about their habits and learning more about their routes" for infiltrating or sending equipment.

But he also reaffirmed that he has no desire to go to war with Tehran. Saying that his job is to "solve these issues diplomatically," Bush suggested heightened interest in reaching a solution with other countries. "You can't solve these problems unilaterally. You're going to need a multilateral forum."

Iran has long been seen as a spoiler in Iraq, with such strong ties to all of the major Shiite political and militia groups, including that of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, that other Arab countries have begun to regard Iraq as almost a client state of Iran.

The recent fighting in Basra, which began when Maliki launched a military offensive against the Mahdi Army militia of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, revealed a threat and an opportunity, officials said.

U.S. military officials said that much of the plentiful, high quality weaponry the militia used in Basra and in rocket attacks against the Green Zone in Baghdad, where the U.S. Embassy and much of the Iraqi government are located, was recently manufactured in Iran. At the same time, the militia's improved targeting and tactics indicated stepped-up Iranian training.

Interrogations of four leaders of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force captured in Iraq in December 2006 and January 2007 have also bolstered U.S. conclusions that portions of Sadr's militia are directed from Tehran.

Despite earlier indications that Iranian backing for Iraqi armed groups and the flow of Iranian arms have waned, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said yesterday that "this action in Basra was very convincing that indeed they haven't." Basra "gave us much more insight into their involvement in many activities."

Gates, who appeared with Mullen at a Pentagon news conference, said of Iran: "We are going to be as aggressive as we possibly can be inside Iraq in trying to counter their efforts." Iraqi security operations in Basra, he said, have been "a real eye-opener" for Maliki's government.

Petraeus told Congress that Maliki had launched the offensive hastily and with inadequate preparation, leading to a standoff and the need to call in U.S. air support. During the first days of the Basra operation, U.S. officials were sharply critical of Maliki's timing and performance; some worried that the attack against Sadr forces was less an offensive against what he called "criminals" in Basra than it was an attempt to win political advantage over a rival Shiite group before upcoming elections.

Iran's brokering of a tentative cease-fire among Shiite political groups and the militia in Tehran added to U.S. consternation.

"The importance of Iranian influence in facilitating the discussion between different political factions was of significant importance," Petraeus told Pentagon reporters yesterday. Administration officials worried that Iran appeared in control of events in Iraq, while the United States seemed weak and uninformed.

But more recently, U.S. officials have seen a possible advantage in the situation. Maliki's willingness to go after fellow Shiites attracted support from other political groups in Iraq, including Sunnis and Kurds, that have long been suspicious of his sectarian leanings. It also gave Washington a talking point to use with Sunni Arab governments in the region that have shunned him. "It's an opportunity to make him look better inside Iraq and to make a better argument to the Arabs," an official said.

The administration has long tried in vain to build Arab diplomatic and economic support for the Iraqi government. But the Arabs, led by Saudi Arabia, consider Shiite Iran a competitor for regional dominance and have rejected Maliki as "a stooge for Tehran," as one U.S. official called him.

"The Saudis appear to feel that the current Iraqi government is pretty much in thrall to Iran," said a State Department official involved in Middle East policy. The administration's hope, "in the wake of Maliki's decisions on Basra," the official said, "is that the Saudis will take a step back and take another look."

In a news conference Thursday, Crocker dismissed Arab concerns about a recent visit to Baghdad by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "It's not the fact of the Ahmadinejad visit, but the absence of visits by other neighbors that it's important to focus on. There hasn't been a single visit, even by an Arab cabinet minister, to Baghdad. As Iraq grapples with the challenges Iran is posing, it could certainly do with some Arab support."

After consultations with Crocker and Petraeus this week, Bush cut short their Washington visit and dispatched them to Riyadh. During a luncheon at The Washington Post, Crocker said that at a White House meeting Thursday morning, they "reviewed where we are in Iraq."

The message to the Saudis, he said, "is going to be . . . it is time, more than time, for the Arab states to step forward and engage constructively with Iraq. Get their embassies open, get ambassadors on the ground, consider visits, implement debt relief, treat Iraq like the country it is, which is a central part of the Arab world."

Staff writers Peter Baker and Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report.

Source: http://www.india-defence.com/reports/3080
Indian Army To Train Afghanistan, Uzbekistan Armed Forces

Dated 24/4/2007
Indian television news channel 'NDTV' reports that a team from the Indian Army will be actively training the Afghan National Army (ANA) later this year. The team is heading to Kabul in the upcoming months.

The Indian Military team will be in Afghanistan as soon as May end to conduct infantry and education corps related training. Another team is to be dispatched to Uzbekistan in the next six months for a similar training programme. Besides teaching English to the troops, it will train them in weapon handling, map craft and fundamental battalion procedures.

'NDTV' quotes "top military officials" as making the revelations to the news channel.

The decision is bound to raise eyebrows in Rawalpindi, which forever has thought of Afghanistan as a Pakistani colony and has been following the "strategic depth" policy for over 3 decades with reference to Kabul.

Since 2001, several Indian military delegations have visited Afghanistan but this is the first time a full-fledged military team will be stationed there. India already has BRO jawans in Afghanistan engaged in various security missions.

The decision to send the team to Kabul was taken in February, and on last Friday the annual Army Commanders' conference also approved plans to send a similar team to Uzbekistan reports NDTV.

Although India is one of the largest contributors to UN peacekeeping forces around the world it is for the first time in the past decade that India is getting involved in a non-UN military mission.

Afghanistan is a important country in the region and security and stability in Afghanistan is critical for stability in India and South Asia as a whole.

Copyright © 2007 India Defence. All Rights Reserved.

The Israel of the Balkans

MICHAEL J. TOTTEN
WEB ONLY

“All we want is to reduce the Albanian population to a manageable level.” – Zoran Andjelkovic, former Serbian governor of Kosovo

Genocide is the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” – United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

The State of Israel is divided on the Kosovo question: should the world’s newest country be recognized? Some, like former Minister for Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman, worry that Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia might encourage Palestinians to make the same move. The small Balkan state, however, may have more in common with Israel than with the West Bank and Gaza.

Israelis, as Amir Mizroch notes in the Jerusalem Post, have excellent relations with the Kosovars. “Israel has an interest in helping to establish a moderate, secular Muslim state friendly to Jerusalem and Washington in the heart of southeast Europe,” he writes. Indeed, Kosovo is neither an enemy state nor a jihad state. Its brand of Islam is heavily Sufi, which is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Wahhabism and Salafism that inspire Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Kosovo doesn’t belong to the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah-Hamas axis. On the contrary, Kosovo has thrown in its lot with the West, and especially with the United States. Serbia’s breakaway province is perhaps the most pro-American country in all of Europe. Bill Clinton is lionized there as a liberator – a main boulevard through the capital Prishtina is named after him – just as George H. W. Bush and his son George W. Bush are hailed as saviors in Iraqi Kurdistan. It should be no surprise then that Mizroch quotes an Israeli official who says Israel most likely will recognize Kosovo if its “influential friends” in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and France, decide to do so.

Concern that Kosovo’s independence might trigger a similar declaration from the West Bank to Spain’s Basque country to Chechnya and beyond is understandable but perhaps overwrought. Bosnia declared independence without unleashing a domino effect beyond Yugoslavia. So did Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. Montenegro declared independence from Serbia less than two years ago. It’s doubtful the Palestinians even noticed. Hardly anyone else did. In any case, it had no effect on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The irrelevance of Kosovo to the Arab-Israeli conflict is underscored by the fact that not a single Arab country has recognized Kosovo. The only Muslim countries which so far have bothered are Turkey, Malaysia, Senegal, Albania, and Afghanistan. The governments of all these countries are, to one extent or another, either moderate, in the pro-Western camp, or both. All aside from Albania have sizeable ethnic minorities of their own. Turkey especially frets about its own separatists – the Kurds in the east – but still went ahead and recognized Kosovo almost instantly.

Many in Kosovo are well aware that they have more in common with Israel than with the West Bank and Gaza. "Kosovars used to identify with the Palestinians because we Albanians are Muslims and Christians and we saw Serbia and Israel both as usurpers of land," a prominent Kosovar recent told journalist Stephen Schwartz. "Then we looked at a map and woke up. Israelis have a population of six million, their backs to the sea, and 300 million Arab enemies. Albanians have a total population of eight million, our backs to the sea, and 200 million Slav enemies. So why should we identify with the Arabs?"

“Many Palestinians also nurtured a similar sympathy for [genocidal Serbian dictator Slobodan] Milosevic,” Schwartz himself wrote in Middle East Quarterly. “What may be considered the most surrealistic gesture during the entire decade of recent Balkan wars occurred six months after NATO’s bombing of Serbia: on December 1, 1999, the Palestinian Authority (PA) invited Milosevic to Bethlehem to celebrate the Orthodox Christmas. News of this invitation, although more or less ignored in the West, was reported with banner headlines in the Balkans. An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman said that if Milosevic accepted the invitation he would be arrested on arrival, since Israel, as a U.N. member, is obliged to fulfill arrest orders issued by The Hague tribunal, which had indicted him. The PA, not being a U.N. member, was under no such obligation. And the PA was not the only Palestinian element to vacillate over Kosovo. Earlier in 1999, the Palestinian Islamic extremist Hamas movement issued a statement, denouncing U.S. intervention to settle the Kosovo crisis as ‘hiding under the slogans of human rights to impose its power in the Balkans.’ Hamas thus echoed the allegations of Milosevic’s own media, as well as the Russians and various leftists worldwide.”

Palestinians weren’t the only Arabs to side with Milosevic against their fellow Muslims. Milosevic also had close ties to Saddam Hussein, as did Vojislav Koštunica’s democratic government that replaced him. Ed Bradley reported in 2003 that as much as three billion dollars worth of weapons, explosives, and equipment – including equipment that would bolster Iraq’s arsenal of Scud missiles – was shipped by the Serb-controlled Yugoslav arms export agency to Iraq before interception by Croatian authorities.

Israelis and Kosovars don’t merely line up on the same Western side geopolitically. They share a moral and ethical temperament with each other, one they also share with the Kurds of Iraq. All are ethnic minorities in their respective regions that wish to be left alone on their own land, untroubled by regional ethnic majorities that wish to suppress or eject them.

90 percent of Kosovars are ethnic Albanians. They lay no claim to proper Serbian land. They have no wish to seize Serbia’s capital Belgrade and ethnically cleanse it of Serbs, nor to rule over Serbs. They want sovereignty over themselves, not over others. They merely want what the other countries of the former Yugoslavia have managed to hammer out for themselves.

While almost the entire world agrees that the Palestinians must someday have a state of their own, Israel’s right to exist is still hotly debated in some quarters, just as Kosovo’s right to exist is denied by many and likely will continue to be denied. No one argues about any Arab state’s right to exist, or about the right of Serbian or Slavic states to exist. Kosovo has joined a small club.

If Albania were using Kosovo as a launching pad for a conquest of Belgrade, the Serbs would have a case for occupying their land, just as the Israelis occupied the West Bank and Gaza after a multi-state Arab assault with destructive intent in 1967. Albanians generally, and Kosovars in particular, have no such designs in store for the Serbs.

Belgrade's current claim to Kosovo is dubious in any case. Serbia only “owned” Kosovo when Milosevic revoked the autonomy it previously enjoyed before Yugoslavia came apart. The land should be theirs, Serbs say, because Kosovo Polje is a crucial place in their history and in the emotionally-charged myths that make up Serbian nationalism. Kosovo Polje is important because Serbian leader Czar Lazar lost a war there to the Turks in the nearby Field of Blackbirds in 1389. The Arab case for their right to Tel Aviv is stronger than this.

Unlike the Jews of World War II Europe, ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have a state they could move to – Albania – to flee genocide and oppression. They're like the post-1948 Jews of the Middle East who could escape to the state of Israel. This does not, however, mean they should have to

March 30, 2008
Between West and East

By MICHAEL J. TOTTEN
MIRROR OF THE ARAB WORLD

Lebanon in Conflict.

By Sandra Mackey.

303 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $25.95.

First-time visitors to Lebanon are often startled at how different the country seems from the rest of the Arab world. Spectacular snow-capped mountains rise sheer from the shores of the Mediterranean. Freewheeling Beirut, where almost everything short of murder and rape is allowed, feels more like Hong Kong or Amsterdam than dreary Damascus or Cairo. Elegant women, Muslim as well as Christian, dress as stylishly as their counterparts in Milan and Manhattan. Plastic surgeons are as ubiquitous as decadent and erotically charged nightclubs. Democracy isn’t pushed on the Lebanese by diplomats or foreign soldiers — it’s taught in schools, and has been for more than a half-century.

But Lebanon is also where Palestinian guerrillas, living in squalid camps, fought a hot war with the national army last year. Bullet-pocked and mortar-shattered towers stand as gruesome reminders that history continues to be made in Beirut, that the Paris of the Middle East moonlights as the Baghdad of the Levant. “Until Iraq took a share of the title in 2003,” Sandra Mackey writes in “Mirror of the Arab World: Lebanon in Conflict,” “the most tormented of all Arab countries was Lebanon.”

Though far and away the most liberal, democratic and sophisticated of Arabic-speaking countries, Lebanon, as Mackey convincingly shows, still hasn’t managed to overcome the Arab world’s troubles. Identity is rooted in family, clan, sect and ideology more than in the nation. The weak central government can’t administer or police its territory. Meddlesome foreigners use the country for proxy wars, at times occupying swaths of its land with their own soldiers. Borders are only vaguely defined in some places, and everywhere else were drawn up by Western imperialists in collaboration with local clients. Conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, and between Muslims and Christians, has plunged Lebanon into civil war and may do so again. Hezbollah’s radical Islamist militia administers its own area and is better armed and trained than the national army. In 2006 Lebanon was, yet again, a front line in the intractable Arab-Israeli conflict.

“Mirror of the Arab World” is really two books in one. Mackey’s narrative deftly weaves Lebanon’s tragic history with that of the Arab Middle East as a whole. The author of books on Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Mackey follows Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization from its insurgency against King Hussein in Jordan, through its formation of a state-within-a-state in Lebanon to its exile at the hands of Israeli soldiers. She traces the arc of rising Shiite political power as it developed from Iran’s Islamic Republic and Saddam Hussein’s defeat in Iraq to the emergence of Hezbollah’s protostate in south Lebanon. Rather than look at Iraq as an echo of Vietnam, she finds a closer parallel in the ferocious civil war that pitted sect against sect and local against foreigner in Lebanon during the 1970s and 1980s.

Mackey performs the tricky balancing act of demonstrating that Lebanon is unique yet somehow still reflective of all Arab countries. “The world of the Arabs is no longer a mysterious, romanticized region lying somewhere between Europe and Asia,” she writes. “It is here. It is now. And it is difficult.” Lebanon is especially difficult.

Beirut has long been considered a gateway between the West and the East. It is also a doorway to understanding, because to know Lebanon is to know the Arabs. “Mirror of the Arab World” is an expert depiction of both.

Michael J. Totten is an independent foreign correspondent specializing in the Middle East. He is a former resident of Beirut.

Michael J. Totten
Hope for Iraq’s Meanest City
How the surge brought order to Fallujah
Spring 2008
Fallujah is strange, sullen, wild-eyed, badass, and just plain mean,” writes Bing West in his 2005 war chronicle No True Glory. “Fallujans don’t like strangers, which includes anyone not homebred. Wear lipstick or Western-style long hair, sip a beer or listen to an American CD, and you risk the whip or a beating.” Fallujah has been Iraq’s bad-boy city since at least the time of the British in Mesopotamia; even then, travelers were warned to stay out. More recently, Saddam Hussein recruited some of his regime’s most ruthless officers from Fallujah. Even though it was a quieter city than most in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, with less looting than in Baghdad and a staunchly pro-American mayor, the Americans should have known that Fallujah was trouble.

But they didn’t, and so they were unprepared when a rogues’ gallery of Islamists, Baathists, and garden-variety malcontents made the city the launching pad for an Iraqi insurgency. The Fallujans who embraced the insurgency were foolhardy, too: had they looked at what similarly-minded Islamist totalitarians had done to Afghanistan, they would have known what hell awaited them at the insurgents’ hands. General David Petraeus’s radical transformation of counterinsurgency tactics has come at just the right time: the overwhelming majority of Fallujans, deciding that America is the lesser of evils, have now aligned themselves with the Marines and the American-backed city government.

The insurgency arose in Fallujah before spreading to the rest of the country. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that the insurgents—now on the run elsewhere in Iraq—were first beaten here in the City of Mosques.

Fallujah’s darkest period began with a lynching. Simmering resentment against the American presence exploded in an orgy of violence on March 31, 2004, when a Fallujah mob murdered four security contractors from the Blackwater corporation, mutilated them, and strung them up from a bridge. The following month, the U.S. Army and Marines stormed in. But concerned that their assault would provoke violent reactions across Iraq—as, in fact, it did—the Americans retreated, their mission unfinished, and insurgents seized power. Taliban-style rule had come to Iraq.

Some of the insurgents were just looking for work and shot at Americans because they were paid to do so. Many were born and raised in Fallujah, where the Saddam regime had fed them a steady diet of anti-American propaganda; they sprouted from the same supply of xenophobic fanatics that had given the city its cruel reputation for so many decades. But the fiercest insurgents were foreigners—freelance jihadists from the Persian Gulf states, North Africa, and the Levant, some of them veterans of battles in Chechnya and Afghanistan—who formed the Iraqi franchise of the same international terrorist group that had slammed hijacked jetliners into lower Manhattan skyscrapers. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq made the two biggest cities in Anbar Province—Fallujah and nearby Ramadi, Anbar’s capital—the heartland of its so-called Islamic State in Iraq.

Many Fallujans initially welcomed Zarqawi and his lieutenants as liberators from the hated American occupiers. But the jihadists did not fight for freedom. Instead, they enforced Islamic law at the point of a gun, establishing a brand of fascism even worse than Saddam’s. They murdered sheikhs who opposed them. They butchered their enemies’ families, burning women alive and slashing children’s throats with kitchen knives, and massacred other families for accepting food from Marines. City officials, tribal authorities, police officers—anyone in charge of anything was targeted for destruction.

Though al-Qaida in Iraq is Sunni, like most Fallujans, its totalitarian vision has little in common with Islam as traditionally practiced in this conservative city. It was even more at odds with local secular habits and conventions. The new order in the city under American occupation, the old order under Saddam Hussein, and the ancient tribal system that predated both—all had to be swept away. “When you join the al-Qaida organization, the first thing you have to do is get your parents far away from your mind,” an Iraqi police officer tells me. “There can be nothing else. Only the al-Qaida organization. Your kids, your wife, your family, your parents, your beliefs—all have to be out.”

Realizing that Fallujah had become the terror capital of Iraq, the U.S. began a second assault in November 2004, seven months after its initial failure to secure the city. Ordered out of the way by the American military, civilians abandoned Fallujah en masse, reducing a city of more than 400,000 people to a booby-trapped, explosives-laced ghost town inhabited only by the insurgents. Then the United States Army and Marine Corps crashed through the walls and fought the massive battle that today even Americans call al-Fajr (“Dawn”). The insurgents lost, but their loss wasn’t decisive, and they continued to tear the city apart for almost three years, terrorizing the civilians who trickled back slowly after the battle.

By late 2006, Fallujans had had enough. Though they had little desire to be ruled, or even nurtured into self-rule, by Americans, the jihadist alternative was clearly worse. So Fallujah formed an alliance with its former enemies. The alliance is one of convenience, and possibly temporary, but it was forged in the crucible of the most wrenching catastrophe Fallujans have experienced in living memory.

“I feel the sincerity in the American support for the Iraqi civilians here,” one Fallujah resident tells me. “I am not going to say any bad words about Americans. I can feel that they really are eager to accomplish that mission.” Another Fallujan, who works as a money changer, says, “It will be a shame on all of us if the terrorists ever come back.” “Security is good now because the coalition, Iraqi army, and Iraqi police all work together,” says a third, the owner of a fruit stand. “One hand does not clap.”

Fallujans say this sort of thing partly because they believe it and partly because the provincial tribal leadership ordered them to switch sides. In late 2006, pro-American and antiterrorist sheikhs formed a movement called Sahawa al-Anbar—the Anbar Awakening—to purge the killers from their lands. Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, then head of the movement’s Anbar Salvation Council, made himself al-Qaida’s most formidable enemy in the province. “Our American friends had not understood us when they came,” he said to Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami. “They were proud, stubborn people and so were we. They worked with the opportunists, now they have turned to the tribes, and this is as it should be. The tribes hate religious parties and religious fakers.” He was assassinated by a car bomb in front of his house in September 2007, almost certainly at al-Qaida’s hands. His brother Ahmed took over his leadership role, vowing “to fight al-Qaida until the last child in Anbar.” By then, every tribal leader in Anbar Province had flipped to the American side.

While the Americans were lucky, in a sense, that al-Qaida so thoroughly disgusted the locals, Petraeus’s strategy shift was crucial to beating the insurgents. Before the surge, American counterinsurgency had followed a “light footprint” model: soldiers and Marines lived on large protected bases and did everything they could to avoid casualties. The thinking was that this approach not only protected the military; it also would keep Iraqis from viewing Americans as oppressive occupiers. But the light footprint model prevented the Americans from providing security to Iraqis, who began to regard their occupiers as not merely oppressive but incompetent to boot.

When Petraeus surged additional troops to Iraq in January 2007, the light footprint model was replaced with aggressive counterinsurgency operations that, perhaps counterintuitively, prioritized the protection of local civilians over American forces. “Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be,” the Army’s new manual on counterinsurgency (COIN) explains. “Ultimate success in COIN is gained by protecting the populace, not the COIN force. If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents. Aggressive saturation patrolling, ambushes, and listening post operations must be conducted, risk shared with the populace, and contact maintained. . . . These practices ensure access to the intelligence needed to drive operations. Following them reinforces the connections with the populace that help establish real legitimacy.”

Marines also took the vitally important step of surrounding Fallujah with concrete Jersey and Texas barriers, forcing all incoming traffic through checkpoints manned by Iraqi police. Visitors can no longer bring cars in—they must park outside the city limits and walk—and locals must affix resident stickers to their windshields. High-tech surveillance cameras monitor every inch of ground outside the city; sneaking in is impossible. Perhaps it’s fitting that people as provincial and, yes, medieval-minded as these live in a place that’s as fortified as a thirteenth-century walled city. (One Marine describes Fallujah as “the Dark Ages with TVs and cars”; Iraqis think of this city in much the same way.) The barriers were unattractive, so the Americans hired local artists to paint murals on them depicting ancient Iraqi and Babylonian architecture, idyllic scenes from greener countries than this, and messages of peace in Arabic calligraphy.

The barriers don’t merely separate the city from the rest of Iraq; they separate neighborhoods from one another, too. Foot traffic isn’t restricted, but no one can drive from one neighborhood to another without passing through a police checkpoint. Smuggling weapons is prohibitively difficult. Anyone who wants to set off a car bomb will have to content himself with blowing up his own neighborhood. The walls are a major hassle, but they work. Fallujah’s most recent car bomb exploded last July.

The barriers also divide each section of the city into intimately patrollable precincts. Inside these precincts, U.S. Marines and Iraqi police have forged a straightforward agreement with civilians: we’ll keep you safe if you identify insurgents and lead us to improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and weapons caches. Americans no longer patrol in Humvees, as they did at the peak of the insurgency. Instead, the Marines have embedded themselves, so to speak, in Fallujah’s communities. They have transformed large rented houses into Joint Security Stations that look and feel like low-budget university co-ops, where they share sleeping quarters, eating areas, movie rooms, and makeshift gyms with Iraqi police. They live together, work together, study Arabic and English together, and, above all, patrol their own neighborhoods together.

This is community policing, Fallujah-style, and so far it has been even more effective than similar programs that have turned around rough U.S. neighborhoods, from New York City to Portland, Oregon. “I swear I don’t mean to sound like I’m selling something,” Sergeant Stephen Deboard says. “But what the Marines are doing out there in the city is amazing. They are so integrated in the community. The first time I stayed at one of the stations, I awoke to the sound of an Iraqi baby crying and the smell of the neighbor’s eggs cooking. They’re living right there with the Iraqis.”

The results of the Anbar Awakening and the surge are plain to see. Since the Fifth Marine Regiment’s Third Battalion rotated into Fallujah in September 2007, not a single American has been wounded there, let alone killed. Hardly anyone even tries to start a fight now. A handful of people have taken potshots at Marines; one man threw a hand grenade in the neighborhood of Dubat; some fool blew himself up when the Iraqi police caught him planting an IED outside their station. Every attack has been ineffective. Of all Iraq’s cities, only nearby Ramadi has experienced so many dramatic changes in so short a time.

“We tell people that we’re in our third battle of Fallujah,” First Lieutenant Barry Edwards says. “The first was in April of 2004, which we’ll say we lost. November and December of 2004 we kicked ass. Al-Qaida in Iraq promised televisions, refrigerators, and air conditioners, [but] they did not follow through. Al-Qaida was trying to take them back in time. The Iraqis said, ‘No, we don’t want that. We want televisions, refrigerators, and air conditioners.’ They see that the Americans are actually providing [these things]. We tell them that if they can get their area secure, we can get their televisions and air conditioners running and keep them running. When they see that, things improve.”

Edwards concludes: “Now we’re in that third battle where if we back off right now, al-Qaida in Iraq will get back in. They want Fallujah. It’s a very influential city. It’s their first clubhouse.”

Not that Fallujah is going to be a tourist attraction anytime soon. There was a time when Fallujah had money, and most of its houses are still quite large, even in the poor neighborhoods. Almost all of them are riddled with bullet holes, however, and some are just piles of rubble. The city’s infrastructure is shot, half of its citizens are unemployed, most factories in its industrial district are closed, and its culture is stultifying even by conservative Arab standards. I see no bookstores, libraries, movie theaters, or any other public place where culture can be consumed, but only a handful of men-only cafés serving identical glasses of tea. Alcohol isn’t banned, but only one bar exists in all of Fallujah, and it’s on a side street next to a boarded-up building. The owner doesn’t dare put up a sign.

During the war years, nobody collected the city’s trash, and though today the Marines pay residents to pick it up, the city is hardly clean. It takes a long time to dispose of the buildup and to persuade residents to change their habits and use the new dumpsters, so every street has at least one dump site, and the market smells of rotting garbage and urine. Raw sewage contaminates the streets, too. Unlike some Iraqi cities, Fallujah once had a functioning sewer system, but the insurgents, bent on demonstrating the Americans’ inability to govern, destroyed it by burying hundreds of IEDs beneath the streets and detonating them. A new water-treatment plant is under construction in the poorer southern district, but it will likely take years to rebuild the whole system, even if the war doesn’t start again.

Most vexing, in a country where ferociously hot summers make sleep all but impossible without air conditioning, is the chronic electricity shortage. Traditional houses were relatively easy to cool even in August, but Iraq’s modern homes are designed to be cooled with electrical power. If the power is out or intermittent, they’re heat traps for six months of the year—a fact that the insurgents understood well when they paid desperately poor people to sabotage the electrical grid. Now that the power lines are finally secure, Fallujah’s electrical system is slowly being repaired, and residents get about 12 hours of electricity per day—an improvement, but still brutal during the summer. The outdated system is a rat’s nest of sizzling wires and overloaded transformers even when it is not being messed with; what it really needs is to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch.

It’s difficult to assess how truly safe Fallujah is. On the one hand, while I didn’t meet any Marines who were nervous, all agreed that I would be crazy to walk the streets without their protection, since a small number of insurgents still lurk in the alleys. I’d be kidnapped or worse if I were unlucky enough to stumble on them alone.

On the other hand, Fallujah isn’t as mean as you might expect—at least not on the surface. I walked the streets every day on foot patrols with Marines, and the only mobs we ran into were screaming children who wanted candy, soccer balls, high-fives, and photographs. Whatever Iraqi adults think of Americans, the kids really like us. But the adults seem friendly, too, or indifferent at worst. Several Marines told me that they had met Iraqis who said, in no uncertain terms, that Americans should leave their country at once, but it never happened while I was around. True, Arabs are among the world’s most polite and hospitable people, so it would be a mistake to assume that Fallujans are pro-American just because they smile and wave. But in 2006, no one smiled or waved at Americans here. Marines could count themselves lucky if a cold shoulder was the worst they got.

“This summer, I ate dinner just about every week out there,” Lieutenant Edwards tells me. “I couldn’t have done that back in January [2007]. They would have lit my tail up. You couldn’t go 100 feet down the road that runs along the river without getting hit by an IED. Now we can sit there with our flak jackets and helmets off like we’re sitting right here. . . . We go out there and eat chow with the guys who were shooting at us a year ago.”

Corporal Brandon Koch, who fought in al-Fajr, has returned to Fallujah after three years’ absence. “It’s good to see the city the way it is and to go to the same neighborhoods,” he says. “They’re so much cleaner now. These people are doing things on their own; they’re taking care of their own stuff. When I was here three years ago, I never would have imagined this place would ever be like it is now.”

When American soldiers and Marines abandoned Fallujah in the early days of the war, it wasn’t ready to stand on its own. They are more certain now that their work is nearly finished. Almost all the Army soldiers have left, and only two jobs remain for the Marines: repairing the city; and preparing the local authorities to stand on their own. Most of the effort goes into training the Iraqi police.

Fallujah’s police officers are in better shape than their Baghdad counterparts and in much better shape than they were themselves even six months ago. But they still have a long way to go. Incompetence and corruption are nearly intractable. In the end, only their teachers may save them from their enemies and from themselves. “They will emulate you, gents,” one American officer says to his men. “They. Will. Emulate you. Why? Because we came over here twice and kicked their ass. I do not trust the Iraqi police today. Our job is to get them up to speed. They don’t need to be up to the standard of Americans. But they do need to be better than they are right now.”

Lieutenant Brandon Pearson, a military police officer and the resident expert in American criminal justice, takes a longer view than anyone else I speak with. “They’re where the American police were in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” he says. And though the Iraqis are more than a century behind, they are teachable. “Different agencies within the Marine Corps. . . . . train the Iraqi police,” Captain Stewart Glenn explains. “How to conduct a proper investigation, CSI-type stuff, how to be a detective. We can train the Iraqis on how to handle their weapons properly, how to load and shoot their weapon straight, how to move out in the city, how to enter a house. Some of the Rule of Law things: for example, when you go into someone’s house it is not okay to go to the refrigerator and take a drink. You know what I mean? It’s a small thing, but they’re supposed to be the good guys and this is how good guys act. It’s small stuff, and I know it isn’t real sexy. But this is how you make a country.”

“We’ve already seen a pretty significant difference,” Specialist Brian Henderson says. “When we first got here and went on patrols with the guys from the Dubat station, they were just looking around. Now they’re trying to work on their intervals, their staggers, the stuff that we’ve taught them. They’re putting this stuff into play more and more.”

I sit in on a training class in the town of Karmah, an area on Fallujah’s outskirts that was pacified even more recently than the city proper. First Lieutenant Eric Montgomery is lecturing Iraqi police officers about the high standards expected of them, focusing specifically on the proper rules of engagement, the Law of Armed Conflict, and the United Nations Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials. “If they become like a police state, people are not going to support them,” he tells me afterward. “If we can get them not to beat detainees, that’s a big step.”

No one knows how seriously the Iraqis will adhere to such basic principles after the Americans leave. Every one of them grew up in the shadow of Saddam Hussein; none was exposed to international ethical standards of policing and warfare until now; a civilized police force is an alien concept to them. “These guys aren’t the sharpest tools in the drawer,” a trainer says quietly to me after Montgomery’s lecture is finished. “Well,” I say, “hopefully some of it sticks.” Some of it does, he tells me.

Not all the Marines would agree. “Some of them will tell you straight up that the only reason they are Iraqi police officers is because it pays better than the insurgency,” one sergeant says. “I hear that and I want to say, ‘Hold this guy while I go get my pistol.’ ”

Optimists slightly outnumber the pessimists, though. “The Iraqi police can almost take over now,” says Lieutenant Eric Laughlin. And Lieutenant A. J. DeSantis asks me rhetorically: “Are they Marines? No, but they don’t need to be. They just need to keep their neighborhood safe.”

The Marines’ final mission is the make-or-break mission, as all final missions must be. The third battle for Fallujah will be decisive. After the Americans leave, the city will either transform into a relatively normal backwater that nobody cares about—or tear itself apart. If Fallujah goes, Baghdad goes, and all of Iraq will follow.

A particularly pessimistic U.S. Army soldier I met in Baghdad last summer was certain that Iraq was too dysfunctional and conflict-wracked to be fixed. “Iraq will always be Iraq,” he said. Fallujah, likewise, will always be Fallujah, and Fallujah is difficult. One should not be starry-eyed at the news of its “awakening.” The city is not yet open to the modern world and its ways. Only desperate necessity granted Americans a reprieve from Fallujah’s fear and loathing of outsiders, which it now directs at Baghdad, Iraq as a whole, and international as well as local jihadism. Jeffersonian democracy has not yet come to the banks of the Euphrates.

That said, Fallujah’s worst days are likely behind it. “The al-Qaida leadership outside dumped huge amounts of money and people and arms into Anbar Province,” says Lieutenant Colonel Mike Silverman, who oversees an area just north of Ramadi. “They poured everything they had into this place. The battle against Americans in Anbar became their most important fight in the world. And they lost.”

Michael J. Totten is a writer based in Portland, Oregon. He publishes regular dispatches from the Middle East at MichaelTotten.com.