Assyrian International News Agency
Artwork From Ancient Assyrian Palaces on Exhibit
Posted GMT 8-4-2008 0:15:15
BOSTON -- Ashurnasirpal II, Assyria's self-proclaimed "great king, mighty king, king of the universe," invited 70,000 guests to a 10-day housewarming party in 860 BC to show off his impressive new home at Kalhu. Constructed on 900 acres in northern Assyria--now modern-day Iraq--it was the most magnificent palace the ancient Near East had ever seen. Almost Boston (MFA), will also marvel at the wondrous decorations that West Palace when the exhibition, Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria in the British Museum, goes on view in the Gund Gallery at the MFA from September 21, 2008--January 4, 2009. This exhibition showcases 250 objects from the British Museum, which has the finest collection of Assyrian art outside of Iraq, found in palaces and temples dating from the 9--7th centuries BC located at Kalhu (present-day Nimrud) and Nineveh along the Tigris River in northern Iraq. Art and Empire is collaboration between the British Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The Neo-Assyrian empire -- which emcompassed much of today's Middle East -- represents a fascinating period, and this exhibition highlights the grand palaces, monumental wall reliefs, and rare artifacts of its kings," said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the MFA. "This spectacular collection also gives visitors the opportunity to explore the power, majesty, and sophistication of an ancient civilization that was little understood until it was rediscovered by archeologists less than two centuries ago."

Art and Empire chronicles Assyria's rise from a small landlocked kingdom in northern Mesopotamia to a magnificent empire stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. Its territories encompassed all of present-day Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, as well as large parts of Israel, Egypt, Turkey, and Iran--the greatest dominion known until that time. The exhibition features artistry created for several great Neo-Assyrian kings, from the first, Ashurnasirpal II (883--859 BC) of Nimrud, to the last, Ashurbanipal (668--631 BC), of Nineveh. Art and Empire brings the grandeur of this ancient Near Eastern realm to life through the display of 30 monumental wall reliefs, as well as numerous cuneiform clay tablets, sculpture--both statues and stelae--and cylinder seals. Works on view range from The king on campaign (about 875--860 BC), a regal wall relief of Ashurnasirpal II going to battle in Kurdistan, to Dying Lion (around 645 BC), the moving image of the noble beast in the throes of a painful death from an arrow lodged in his back, created during the reign of Ashurbanipal. (Among the finest wall relief carvings from this period are those of the lion hunts created for Ashurbanipal's North Palace at Nineveh.) These are among the many objects that shed light on the administration of the empire, culture, trade, personal beliefs, and interrelationships between religion, magic, and medicine. Military dress, equipment, and horse trappings illustrating army life, as well as decorative ivory pieces, furniture fittings, and metal vessels showcasing the luxurious cosmopolitan lifestyle enjoyed by royalty, are among the highlights of the exhibition.

"The reliefs from Nineveh and Nimrud are a visual encyclopedia of ancient Mesopotamia, one of the cradles of civilization," said exhibition curator Lawrence Berman (the MFA's Norma Jean Calderwood Senior Curator of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian, and Near Eastern Art). "Today we are particularly aware how vulnerable these archaeological sites are in Iraq, and we can appreciate better than ever the efforts of archaeologists and museums past and present to preserve this part of the world's heritage."

In the mid 19th century, the full scope of ancient Assyria's grandeur and supremacy was revealed through the efforts of French and British explorers. Preeminent among them was Austen Henry Layard, a British archeologist, whose interest was piqued by a large mound near Mosul, which he thought was ancient Nineveh. It proved to be Nimrud, the site of the ancient Assyrian city of Kalhu (known as Calhu in the Bible), and his discoveries there and at Nineveh in the 1840s and '50s form the core of Art and Empire. Later excavations in the region by such notables as Hormuzd Rassam, George Smith, and Sir Max Mallowan, including finds made at Ashur and Khorsabad, complete the picture of Assyrians as mighty warriors and cultured sophisticates whose deeds were recorded in stone.

The richness of Assyrian culture is the focus of Art and Empire, which is organized to highlight such subjects as the king and his world of opulence; the palaces and temples of the kingdom; the importance of warfare; royal lion and bull hunts; the significance of magic and religion; the royal fascination with literature and science, and administration and society.

The interiors of Ashurnasirpal II's palace at Nimrud, as well as Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh, were magnificently adorned using wall reliefs as paneling along the bottom half of painted, mud-brick walls. Figuring prominently in the exhibition, these gypsum slabs are artfully carved with iron and copper tools. They average in size from about three-feet square, such as Three Protective Spirits (about 645--640 BC), to the immense and panoramic, such as The Battle of Til-Tuba (about 650 BC)--consisting of three panels, each roughly 6 feet square. (All are technically fragments, having been cut down from larger compositions and even entire walls.) They shed light not only on techniques of warfare, but also on daily activities, religion, and the luxurious lifestyle enjoyed by Assyrian kings. Brightly colored (faint traces of the original paint are sometimes evident) so that they could be seen in the palace's dimly lit staterooms and living quarters, the wall reliefs feature the kings as fierce warriors, hunters, and worshipers of Assyrian gods. Cuneiform inscriptions herald their conquests and achievements. Fantastic mythical creatures as well as protective winged genii ward away evil spirits. Such expansive wall reliefs were part of an elaborate decorative plan that glorified the king; they also served as propaganda--proclaiming his awesome majesty while warning of the gruesome death and destruction that would befall his enemies.

In addition to mandating a new look for Assyrian palaces, Ashurnasirpal II was responsible for the creation of Assyrian sculpture as we now know it. Carved in magnesite, an extremely hard stone, the Statue of Ashurnashirpal II (883--859 BC), stands approximately 6 feet tall with its original pedestal, and is the largest and best preserved Assyrian royal sculpture in the round. The ruler appears without a crown, but with long hair and an ornately curled beard. He wears a tunic and fringed shawl, and carries a ceremonial sickle to fight monsters, as well as a mace symbolizing his god-given authority. Inscribed on his chest is a list of his titles and ancestors. The statue was found in the Temple of Ishtar, where it was placed as a devotional piece.

Sculpture, in the form of monumental bas-reliefs, chronicled a king's achievements, particularly on the battlefield, where wars were conducted in the name of the state god, Ashur, from whom the name "Assyria" is derived. Escape across a river (about 875--860 BC) dramatizes an incident during the reign of Ashurnasirpal II when, in 878 BC, the king and his soldiers encountered enemies near the Euphrates river. Assyrian archers along the river bank are seen in the relief shooting at the men, who are swimming away to safety with the aid of inflated animal skins. Another work, The Battle of Til-Tuba, dates to the reign of Ashurbanipal. Its depiction of bloody warfare reinforces the Assyrians' reputation for ruthlessness. The Battle of Til-Tuba, a monumental work considered the finest large-scale composition in Assyrian art, shows the Assyrians defeating the Elamites of southern Iran. Scenes highlight the Elamite king's chariot crashing down, the king's flight from the wreckage, and his capture and beheading, with the severed head being carried back as a trophy to Assyria. The story unfolds amid a backdrop of horrible carnage and the confusion of battle.

Overseeing human interactions are the protective spirits and demons associated with Assyrian magic and religion, who guarded the palace against harmful influences. Set of protective spirits (about 645--640 BC), from Ashurbanipal's North Palace in Nineveh, features three magical figures who protected the king as a set: a lahmu, or Mesopotamian diety; an ugallu or "Great Lion;" and what appears to be a House God. Their features conform to precise rules of design and they are shown as though viewed from the front, while their heads are in profile--a standard Assyrian convention for representations of the human body. Clay tablets and amulets inscribed with incantations also were used to deter demonic spirits. Included in Art and Empire are several of these tablets, which also feature magical spells. Amulets, inscribed with incantations, were worn as protective devices. Stone head of Pazuzu and Bronze head of Pazuzu, both from the 8th--7th century, show the mythical evil creature, known as the "scary demon," whose image could be used for good, especially in the instance of protecting expectant mothers and newborns.

Large wall reliefs also were used to document the kings' preoccupation with hunting. Lion hunts provided an outlet for non-wartime combat, as Assyrians saw lions as savage enemies representing untamed nature. Royal lion hunt (about 875--860 BC) shows the king with bow drawn, ready to shoot once more at a fallen lion about to be trampled upon by the king's horses. At one point in Assyrian history, it was decreed that only royalty could kill lions.

Such rules and regulations, as well as public documents (tax rolls, agricultural records, treaties), religious rituals, and literary texts were written in cuneiform script and preserved on clay tablets, many of which were discovered by Layard's protégé, Hormuzd Rassam, from the extensive library at Ashurbanipal's palace in Nineveh. The king asserted that he could read the wedge-shaped cuneiform script, and his desire to preserve in one place all of the world's important works of literature and science has been called visionary. Some of the works collected by Ashurbanipal were 1,000 years old at the time. Included in the king's library were fragments from a copy of the Epic of Creation (7th century BC) as well as from The Epic of Gilgamesh (7th century BC), considered the most important work of Mesopotamian literature. In the 19th and 20th century, more than 20,000 cuneiform tablets were discovered by the British Museum.

While stone wall reliefs served as the primary aesthetic enhancement in Assyrian palaces and temples of the 9th --7th century, other objects in Art and Empire highlight the refinement of their decorative arts. Intricately carved ivory pieces often were used to embellish royal furnishings, sometimes accented with semi-precious stones and gold leaf, such as in The Lioness and the African (9th--8th century BC). The panel, which depicts a lion mauling a man in front of a beautifully carved floral background, is most likely Phoenician, acquired through trade or as war booty(The only other plaque of this kind, one of the treasures of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, has been missing since 2003.) Another ivory panel is Woman at the window (9th --8th century BC), which captures the contemplative expression of a woman in Egyptian headdress staring out the window. Intricate carvings also can be found on cylinder seals used by the royal household; when rolled out over clay, the impressions they made served as official seals. Often crafted from semi-precious stone, the cylinders featured scenes of kings, warriors, gods, as well as animals in combat. Such cylinders were used to form a parure, or jewelry set, commissioned by Layard as a wedding gift for his wife, Enid. After wearing her grand necklace of Assyrian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Achaemenidian cylinders and seals, Lady Layard later wrote in her diary that it was "much admired" by Queen Victoria when the Layards dined with her in 1873.

Other decorative items found during excavations by Layard include intricately incised bronze bowls and plates. In 1849, he discovered at the Nimrud site the so-called "Room of the Bronzes" containing hundreds of objects, about 150 of which were sent to the British Museum. Called the Nimrud Bowls, they were most likely acquired as war booty or royal tribute. Bronze also was used to decorate wooden doors erected by Shalmaneser III (858--824 BC) at his palace at Balawat. Sixteen embossed and chased bands from the Balawat Gates, approximately 10 inches tall by 70 inches wide, were discovered, documenting in exacting detail various incidents from the king's campaign in 859 BC. Two bands are included in the exhibition as are such objects as portraits of Lord Austen and Lady Enid Layard, a copy of Layard's 1854 book, The Monuments of Nineveh, and photographs and descriptions of Assyrian excavations.

Admission/Hours

Admission to Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria in the British Museum, which includes general admission and a return visit to the MFA's collection within 10 days, is by ticket only for a reserved date and time of entry at half-hour intervals. Although same-day tickets will be sold (when available) at the Museum's box office, advance reservations are recommended to ensure admission to the exhibition. Tickets can be purchased by visiting the MFA's Box Office, the website www.mfa.org, or by calling 800.440.6975.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

August 3, 2008
The Last Battle

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
I. The Shiite Moment

One morning this spring I climbed into a Polish helicopter with a major-general in the Iraqi Army named Othman Ali Farhood. He had just surveyed the situation in Kut, a small city 100 miles southeast of Baghdad where Iraqi forces were contending with a Shiite militia, and was returning to his division headquarters near the city of Diwaniya. Othman, who is a lanky man with a welcoming manner, commands the Eighth Division, rated by the U.S. military as one of Iraq’s best units. In many ways, he also embodies the complexities of Iraq today — including its best hopes for a stable future. A career military man, he served under Saddam Hussein; a tribal sheik, he was at home in the ancestral culture of Iraq’s south; a member of Iraq’s Shiite majority, he and his family had been discriminated against under Saddam’s Sunni-dominated regime. Othman prides himself on his ability to rise above sectarianism, but he also conveys a belief in the historical inevitability of the Shiite ascension in Iraq. “Right now we are the leaders of Iraq,” he told me, “and we will not let it go to anybody else.”

By the time I met up with him, Othman had proved himself one of the Americans’ most effective partners. Over the past year he worked with Team Phoenix, which was composed of three marines dispatched by Gen. David H. Petraeus to troubleshoot problems in the Shiite south. Together they devised a plan to rid Diwaniya of the Shiite militias that roamed freely through the streets, and to strengthen the hand of Shiite tribal leaders: a variation on the tribal-empowerment plan that had already done so much to blunt the power of Sunni insurgents in Iraq’s once-violent Anbar Province. But their strategy wound up attracting far more attention than they liked from the Shiite-led government of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, for the simple reason that sharing power within the Shiite fold was just as difficult for many Shiites as sharing power with Sunnis.

Over the previous few years, my own trips through Iraq had focused mostly on the U.S. and Iraqi governments’ struggle with Sunni insurgents in battlegrounds like Mosul, Baquba, Hit and Arab Jabour. But the nature of the war has fundamentally changed. The American “surge,” together with a strategy that emphasized protecting civilians and engaging with Sunni tribesmen, weakened Sunni insurgents and jihadists. The bitter fighting between Shiites and Sunnis that turned Baghdad into a killing ground of car bombs, suicide attacks and mutilated corpses has quieted down. And now this sectarian struggle has been eclipsed by a growing tussle for power among the Shiites themselves. The competition involves Prime Minister Maliki and the Shiite religious parties (the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and Maliki’s Dawa Party) that constitute the ruling hierarchy in Baghdad; Moktada al-Sadr’s weakened but still-popular political movement and its military wing, the Jaish al-Mahdi, or Mahdi Army; and, increasingly, Shiite tribes.

The tug of war among the religious parties and the Shiite tribes has emerged as one of the most-significant but also least-understood aspects of Iraq’s political scene. It pits leaders from the Shiite core of Maliki’s coalition against outsiders looking for a way in. It is a struggle between party officials who spent the Saddam years in exile, mostly in Iran, and tribal leaders who endured his rule at home — and, on another level, a contest between urbanized Shiites, who lean more toward the religious parties and Sadr’s movement, and agrarian Iraqis, whose loyalties lie more in tribal society. Significantly, it is also a rivalry between Shiites who favor a government based on religious parties and those who have a more secular vision.

All of these tensions have been growing as Iraqis prepare for provincial elections, which are expected to be held by early next year and will set the stage for national elections to choose a new Parliament. While Americans have been preoccupied with the presidential race at home, Maliki has been doing everything he can to buttress his position and consolidate control.

“The most prominent dividing line in Iraqi politics now is between the ‘powers that be’ and the ‘powers that aren’t,’ ” Sam Parker, an Arabic speaker who works for the United States Institute of Peace, a policy center in Washington, told me recently. “The ‘powers that be’ spent much of the 1980s and 1990s in open opposition to Saddam. Nearly all of these leaders spent substantial time outside of Iraq. They have well-organized parties but lack a strong social base and have an outsize degree of influence in the national and provincial governments. Because of their disproportionate dominance of the political process, they only stand to lose by any movement toward political openness.

“The ‘powers that aren’t,’ ” Parker added, “are fragmented and weak. What they want is in.”

Where does the U.S. stand? “They seem to be working hard for provincial elections,” Parker said, “which would make the system more inclusive and give the ‘powers that aren’t’ and the popular forces they represent an opportunity for a share of the power. But at the same time, the United States’ main priority appears to be buttressing the state security apparatus that belongs to the ‘powers that be.’ ”

In an ideal world the two policy imperatives would be balanced. The politics of inclusiveness would lay the foundation for the long-term stability of the country, while improvements in Maliki’s capacity to govern would lead to a state that could supplant the Hobbesian state of nature that has typified Iraq — and make it easier for the United States to reduce forces. Iraq, however, is far from an ideal world, and Maliki’s growing confidence in his own power leaves the U.S. steadily less able to shape events.

II. Controlling the Center

A dirt-poor city of half a million, Diwaniya is the capital of rural Qadisiya Province. There is a factory there, now shuttered, that once made tires for much of Iraq. Diwaniya is also near the site of an ancient battle in which an Arab army defeated the Persians and, according to Muslim tradition, helped bring Islam to what is now the Islamic Republic of Iran. Portraits of Imam Ali, the martyr whom Shiites revere as the legitimate successor of Muhammad, are everywhere on the city’s walls.

The city is also just a few miles north of Camp Echo, where a Polish general this spring oversaw a force including Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Lithuanian and Mongolian troops. The small American contingent was limited to military advisers to the Iraqi division; a military-police unit that worked with the Iraqi police; a Special Forces team; and Army National Guardsmen from Illinois who had a partnership program with the Polish Army.

General Othman had troops in five southern provinces, but his division headquarters was set up in a series of neat one-story buildings little more than a stone’s throw from Camp Echo. It was a short but significant distance: the Iraqis were outside the wire. Over cups of sugary tea, Othman explained that Qadisiya Province was an important junction for pilgrims headed west to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, for American military supplies running north — and for Iranian-made arms. “You can consider Diwaniya as the heart of the middle of Iraq,” he said.

The Iraqi commander saw an Iranian hand behind much of the trouble in his zone and said there was a continuing need for American support. “Iran has supported the militias with money and weapons,” he said. That was one reason a speedy American withdrawal would be “disastrous,” he said, adding, “The Iraqi army now is not complete.”

Othman was not an instant partner for the U.S. military. During his years in Hussein’s army he was a devoted student in the military schools and received reconnaissance training in the Soviet Union. As a Shiite, however, he was never fully accepted by the regime. A number of his relatives were arrested when a Shiite rebellion swept the south after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and several, he told me, were never seen again.

Detained by the American military in March 2003, Othman was, he said, treated well and he read newspapers to keep track of the turmoil engulfing his country. But he considered Ambassador L. Paul Bremer’s decision in May 2003 to disband the Iraqi Army such an affront that he refused to join the American effort to build a new military from scratch. “They offered me a chance to come back to the army, but I refused,” Othman said. “I considered that an insult for the army.”

A sheik in the Ghannam tribe, Othman hails from a small village 30 miles from Diwaniya, where he still resides in a modest one-story home guarded by his tribesmen. Like many tribal leaders, he is not ostentatiously religious — in contrast, for example, to the governor of Qadisiya, who is a solid party man with the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and spent nearly two decades in Iranian exile. Othman has no compunctions about shaking hands with a woman or seeing her in a professional role. His own daughter is studying to be an electrical engineer.

As Iraq struggled with Sunni insurgents and renegade militias, Othman gradually changed his mind about joining the new army and was given command of a brigade. It was not an easy time to serve in the Iraqi military. Othman’s unit was underequipped, and his men were prone to desertion. But his secularist ease around professional women helped him find a way out of his predicament. A Marine lieutenant, Ann Gildroy, had the task of working with the overmatched Iraqi troops. The daughter of a retired Army Green Beret who served in Vietnam, Gildroy graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and tried investment banking before disappointing her parents by joining the Marines in 2001. After graduating from officer-candidate school, Gildroy was in Hawaii with Marine Aircraft Group 24 when she volunteered in August 2004 to join the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit as a liaison to the Iraqi forces.

It was one of the darkest periods of the war. Bremer closed Sadr’s newspaper, Al Hawza. A secret indictment was issued by an Iraqi judge calling for Sadr’s arrest in connection with the murder of a rival cleric. Sadr’s militia took to the streets, and the Mahdi Army dug in around the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, one of the holiest sites for Shiite Muslims; by August militiamen were shooting it out with the Marines in Najaf’s streets and its vast cemetery, where generations of pious Shiites had sought burial so they could be close to Ali.

The 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit spearheaded the American attack, operating out of Othman’s old base near Najaf. It was some of the most intense combat American forces had seen since the toppling of Saddam — and the first major battle that pitted them against a Shiite militia.

Alarmed by the ragged state of the Iraqi troops, Gildroy drafted a damning memo and took the bold step that same August of going above her Marine superiors directly to a general whom she had barely heard of but who was in charge of training the Iraqi forces: David Petraeus. When Petraeus visited Najaf soon after, she followed up with a tough briefing in a tent outside the city. “I was very candid with him about how frustrated we were,” Gildroy recalled. “I told him that the Iraqi soldiers had only five rounds of ammo per weapon, that there was no system in place to request more, that most of the soldiers did not have SAPI” — armor — “plates for their flak jackets, that there was no mechanism for us to buy food or water for the troops, that they did not even have a barracks to sleep in.”

When it came time for the Marine unit to return home, and with Najaf more or less pacified, Gildroy agreed to stay behind to serve as Petraeus’s go-to officer in the south. She teamed up with another Marine lieutenant, Seth Moulton, who gave a commencement address when he graduated from Harvard on the need for national service. He had commanded a rifle platoon on the march to Baghdad and was on his second Iraq tour.

Petraeus’s training command was located in a section of the Green Zone named Phoenix Base, so the two Marine lieutenants became Team Phoenix. They worked a variety of assignments, including a stretch with Iraqi forces patrolling the Iran border, which they found distressingly wide open.

As the war dragged on, Othman became a division commander, the Marine lieutenants became captains and the partnership between the Iraqis and the Americans deepened. Petraeus helped arrange for Othman’s wife to be treated in Poland after she was stricken with cancer. During one bleak day, when a young marine whom Gildroy knew was shot and killed in Najaf, Othman led her to the small mosque near division headquarters for a moment of silent contemplation. When Gildroy decided to leave the Marines and apply to Harvard Business School, Othman wrote her a recommendation (in Arabic).

By early 2006, Gildroy and Moulton were out of the service. Gildroy was at Harvard. Moulton had finished a third tour in Iraq. He was working on a book about the need for national service and thinking about graduate school. But Iraq stayed with them; and the new Iraq he and Gildroy struggled so hard to build seemed to be falling apart. The violence between Sunnis and Shiites was spiraling, aggravated by the bombing in February 2006 of a cherished Shiite shrine in Samarra. Political moderates were losing influence, and corruption spread through the police and government ministries. A classified “Index of Civil Conflict” — prepared by the United States Central Command, which oversaw military operations in the Middle East — showed Iraq as edging toward “chaos.”

“Things were going to hell in a handbasket,” Moulton told me. “When I left in 2005, people were complaining more and more about the militia problem, but at the same time there was a drawdown of American forces in the south, which was the real seat of power for the Iraqi government. I remember driving to Karbala in a convoy and being stopped by a supposed Iraqi police unit dressed in green uniforms. I e-mailed General Petraeus to ask if he knew who they were, and he did not know anything about it. It was another new militia, roaming freely.”

Dismayed about the many missteps during the occupation, Moulton was interviewed for “No End in Sight,” a scathing documentary about the Bush administration’s mistakes in planning the Iraq war. But he had not given up. In an op-ed article for The New York Times in September 2006, Moulton recounted the experience of running into the militia and argued that the United States needed to put aside withdrawal time lines, reverse the process of consolidating American forces at the large bases and do more to mentor the Iraqi military. The article was titled “The Right Troops in the Right Places.”

When the Bush administration announced in January 2007 that it would mount the surge with Petraeus in charge, it seemed to Moulton that the principles he wrote about in his op-ed article would be put into practice. Petraeus asked Moulton to join his staff, but Moulton did not want to be a staff officer. He and Gildroy did, however, begin to discuss reactivating Team Phoenix.

A week before Petraeus’s confirmation hearing in Washington, Gildroy flew to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where she talked with him about a new mission for Team Phoenix. Moulton was looking to strengthen the team, but while a number of captains asked if they could join, Moulton had his eye on Alex Lemons, who served in his platoon on the march to Baghdad, had served three Iraq tours and lived in Salt Lake City. Lemons received his undergraduate degree from Westminster College in Utah, planning to get a doctorate in English literature and pursue a teaching career. But on Sept. 12, 2001, he enlisted in the Marines, passing up a chance to go to officer’s school because he wanted to begin his service with the grunts. He was trained as a sniper and was in the thick of the fighting in Najaf, where he fell through the roof of a three-story building while setting up a shooting position, suffering severe injuries to his shoulder. Later, he served in Falluja.

After rising to the rank of platoon sergeant and completing his four-year commitment, Lemons returned to Utah and helped his brother set up a skateboard company, Odeus Apparel. As more-grievously-wounded marines had priority for government-financed medical care, he used most of his personal savings to pay for an operation to repair his shoulder. Though Lemons was a noncommissioned officer, Moulton considered him to be in every respect his equal. Moulton invited Lemons to come see “No End in Sight” at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The former marines hit the ski slopes the next day and talked about having another try in Iraq.

“Ever since Falluja in 2004, I felt I had not accomplished my mission,” Lemons told me not long ago. “I was home, in the inactive reserves, and I still missed fighting in Iraq. When Seth talked to me about the team and the mission, I did not believe we could fix anything. It sounded suicidal at best. But this is my friend, and I will do anything to help him out.”

There was a final piece of business. Even with four stars, Petraeus could not move military personnel around at will. The Marines had to scrounge through existing billets to deploy the new team. Gildroy and Moulton were reactivated and assigned to Iraq as a historian and a communications officer. Lemons went as a driver. Moulton, however, did most of the driving; Lemons was the gunner.

III. Powers That Be

The goals of the surge against Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia were political as well as military. The old strategy assumed that elections and the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis would take the steam out of the insurgency and help the United States to manage with fewer and fewer troops. Iraqi politics, it assumed, would enable the military strategy.

Petraeus’s new approach turned that formula on its head. It postulated that a troop increase — and a strategy that put a premium on protecting civilians — would win over hesitant Iraqis, generate intelligence about the insurgents and give Iraqi leaders the confidence to turn away from their militias and private armies and work together. More than half of the American reinforcements were allocated to the regions surrounding Baghdad that Al Qaeda militants used to mount their car-bomb attacks, while the rest were distributed throughout the city. The theory was that once Al Qaeda was weakened, that would eliminate the rationale that Shiite militias like Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq were needed to protect the Shiite population. Breathing space would be created for political reconciliation. Military action would enable Iraqi politics.

To encourage political change, the United States was working from the top down as well as bottom up. Before the surge, the White House had taken the measure of Maliki, a compromise choice among the Supreme Council and the Sadrists who was named prime minister precisely because his Dawa Party had no militia and thin popular support. (Later he broke with the Sadrists, thus becoming much more dependent on the Supreme Council.) Maliki often told American officials that he had a vision of partnership among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. But Stephen Hadley, President Bush’s national-security adviser, reported in a confidential memo on Nov. 8, 2006, that Maliki was having difficulty figuring out how to be a strong leader and — as a leader of the Dawa Party, which was an underground movement during Saddam’s day — was “naturally inclined to distrust new actors.”

If Maliki broadened his political base, rose above sectarianism and moved against the Shiite militias, Hadley wrote, the United States should do what it could to give the Iraqi prime minister more control over Iraq’s security forces and persuade other politicians to support him, including Sunnis and, notably, the Supreme Council, which had established itself as the most potent party in Maliki’s coalition.

But even as it sought ways to support Maliki, the United States was also hedging its bets by working with tribes in Iraq’s far-flung provinces. Before the surge, the American military had joined forces with Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi (known as Abu Risha) and other Sunni sheiks against Sunni insurgents. The additional American troops during the surge reinforced that effort and encouraged it to spread. The Iraqis called the tribal movement a Sahawa or Awakening. The Americans initially called the tribesmen “concerned local citizens,” but when translated into Arabic that came out something like “worried Iraqis.” So the name was changed to “Sons of Iraq.”

The Americans were working, in Sam Parker’s terms, with both the “powers that be” and the “powers that aren’t.” In theory, the efforts to buttress Maliki and to work with the tribes would eventually merge. Some of the Sons of Iraq would be incorporated into Maliki’s security forces. Others would get jobs building the new Iraq.

The prospect of provincial elections was expected to provide another opportunity for the “powers that aren’t,” including the tribal movement, to work their way in. Many Sunnis were effectively disenfranchised by their decision to boycott previous votes, as were the many Shiites who were influenced by Sadr’s ambivalent pronouncements. Other Iraqis also found themselves politically marginalized by a system that required them to vote for a party, not an individual.

The coming provincial elections are to be far more open and promise to be a significant step forward for democratic inclusion. Sunni tribes in Anbar, for example, see the vote as an opportunity to wrest control from the Iraqi Islamic Party, which currently represents Sunni interests in Baghdad. Sunnis in Nineveh, who make up a plurality of that province’s electorate but chafe under a Kurdish-dominated provincial government, view the elections as an opportunity to redress an imbalance; so do Sunnis in Diyala Province, which has a Shiite governor.

But the provincial elections also represent a democratizing opportunity for many Shiite voters, who do not necessarily want to be represented by the “powers that be.” More than 500 politicians and parties have registered to participate in the provincial elections, including 40 in Basra alone. These represent a potential challenge to the Supreme Council and Dawa parties in Maliki’s coalition, which have the backing of powerful politicians in Baghdad but have done a poor job of delivering services to the Iraqi public, even as the central government’s coffers have filled as a result of high oil prices.

How fair those elections will be is the critical question. “The provincial elections are very important because they have the potential to usher in new leadership that is not drawn from the former exiles,” Joost Hiltermann, an expert on Iraq at the International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental organization, told me. “The Supreme Council and Dawa have not excelled at governance at the local level. If they cannot prevent elections, and it is probably too late for that, they will try to delegitimize the Sadrists and control the process though the domination they have accumulated over the years at the local level. Dawa, for example, has used its control over the Iraqi Red Crescent to appoint local officials to make sure they bring out the vote.”

Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador, told me: “The big thing going forward is the improved security environment and political development that allows the parties and other actors to feel they have a fair shot at being part of the game. So essentially, how the elections are conducted and how they are perceived is important. Another very important issue is governmental capacity to deliver the goods. Iraqis know that the price of oil per barrel is changing.”

Security and politics are, of course, closely intertwined. In Diwaniya, the reconstituted Team Phoenix would find out how much damage Shiite political infighting could do to Shiite security.

IV. Team Phoenix

Team Phoenix was in Baghdad in August 2007 when the governor of Qadisiya Province and the provincial police chief were killed by a roadside bomb as they returned to Diwaniya from the funeral for a prominent sheik in a nearby town. Six days later the team flew to Camp Echo on Petraeus’s helicopter to plan a counterinsurgency campaign to retake the city from the Mahdi Army. Before leaving, Petraeus told them to focus on the renegade militias and find a way to “stab” them “in the heart.”

The team already had a plan in mind, which was to apply the lessons of the Anbar Awakening. Soon after arriving in Baghdad in July 2007, the members of Team Phoenix had headed to Anbar to meet the local Sunni sheiks. Moulton had heard from numerous experts that the tribal engagement carried out in Anbar could not work in the south — that the authority of Shiite tribal leaders was overshadowed by the Shiite religious leaders and diminished by Saddam Hussein’s efforts to undermine and co-opt the Shiite tribes in the 1990s. But the team was not convinced. The Sunni mayor of Ramadi, Moulton told me, “insisted that their problem with Al Qaeda was akin to the south’s problem with Jaish al-Mahdi” — Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia — “and that the tribes would rise up in the same way.”

Indeed, independent of any efforts by Team Phoenix, Shiite tribal leaders had begun to network with the Sunni Anbar sheiks to discuss how they might bring more security to the south and enhance their own political clout. Maj. Gen. John Allen, who served as the second-highest-ranking American officer in Anbar in 2007 and early 2008, recalled how Shiite sheiks from neighboring Karbala Province visited Anbar for a tribal get-together. They chanted poetry and closed the session by posing before an Awakening flag: crossed scimitars, the scales of justice and a pot of coffee on a yellow field. There were other meetings. “Their plea was, ‘Help us to get organized and we can throw off this thing called the Mahdi Army, and we can get the tribal society dominant again in the south, and we can begin to bring social order to the south akin to the way Sunni tribes had brought social order back to Anbar Province,’ ” Allen recalled.

Diwaniya had changed considerably since Team Phoenix’s last stay, and for the worse. During the early months of the surge, in April 2007, the Americans sent troops to Diwaniya to try to wrest back control of the city, an operation dubbed Black Eagle. But after that brief effort, Diwaniya returned to Mahdi Army control and even became a staging ground for attacks on Camp Echo. The heaviest barrage occurred on July 2, 2007, when the militia fired rockets and mortars from three separate locations. More than 80 were fired, and some of the incoming rounds hit the Special Forces barracks, coming dangerously close to igniting ammunition stores. Two soldiers were injured by shrapnel, and most escaped the building with little more than their clothing. The fire was so accurate that the Special Forces were convinced the militiamen had help from inside the base. The coalition base was struck so often that a running joke had it that the camp was named after the mortar blasts that echoed through the compound each night. “They set the time and place of the engagements,” Dale Betz, the former commander of Special Forces at Camp Echo, told me. “It was like we were the insurgents. The Mahdi militias were in control of the city.”

Betz asked Othman’s permission to call in an air strike to hit a target in the city, and the Iraqi general gave the go-ahead. An American warplane leveled a house used by a militia leader who Iraqi intelligence believed was supported by elements in Iran. But without enough troops to occupy the city, the only recourses were Special Forces raids and further air strikes.

The streets in Diwaniya were dangerous for the Iraqis, too. Fourteen of Othman’s soldiers had been captured by the militia the previous year and shot in the head execution-style, and their trucks were set aflame. The grisly episode was documented in a video that a militia fighter took using his cellphone and which I saw during my visit to Camp Echo. The local situation had not improved much since. “We used to hear about a killing episode every day,” Baqer al-Shalan, a tribal leader, said.

Taking a page from counterinsurgency doctrine, Team Phoenix developed a plan to take Diwaniya back, neighborhood by neighborhood. Without surge forces, it would be what the military called an “economy of force” operation. A small combat outpost would be established in one part of the city and staffed by the three marines, a couple of platoons of Polish infantry, a platoon or two of Iraqi troops and the Iraqi police. After one neighborhood was secured, the coalition would move on to another. It was a variation of the “oil spot” theory, a counterinsurgency concept that was conceived and used toward the end of the Vietnam War: the coalition forces establish control over a “spot” in the city; the security they provide then spreads outward like oil.

The team briefed the Polish commander, Maj. Gen. Tadeusz Buk, on the idea. He immediately took to it, reasoning that he could justify the mission to a nervous Polish public at home by saying he was merely supporting Iraqi forces. (Once again, the concept lost something in translation. After being translated into Polish and then back to English it became known as “Operation Oil Drop.”)

On Oct. 2, the new mission began when a small group of Iraqi and coalition forces drove to the Nahda neighborhood in Diwaniya and occupied a youth center. It took several days before Army cranes arrived to install the blast walls to protect the compound from snipers and car bombs. The militia went after the new compound, firing mortars and heaving grenades over the walls. Two Americans were shot in the head as they stood in front of the building. The Poles began to talk about pulling back. Lemons used his sniper skills to improve the structure’s defenses, instructing the Iraqis to man observation posts. Othman also delivered a cautionary word to the Poles. “He told them, ‘If you leave the town now, you would never be able to come back,’ ” Lemons recalled. The Poles decided to stay.

The bigger problem was finding enough forces to make the oil spot spread. The group needed to find a way to keep control of the Nahda neighborhood while moving on to another. Unless they did, they risked repeating the mistakes of Black Eagle: they could clear, but could not hold.

Even before they moved into the Nahda compound, Team Phoenix wanted to complement the effort by reaching out to the Shiite tribes. Tribesmen would watch the roads and provide intelligence on the militias. The tribes that joined the watch program on the roads might also be able to volunteer the best of their guards as recruits for Othman’s division, which was trying to form a new battalion. The tribes had endured or made their peace with Hussein but they were also more secular than the Baghdad parties and very apprehensive about encroachments by the Iranians. In keeping with the vision of a broader Awakening movement, Team Phoenix also hoped to bring the tribes, who had been largely marginalized, into the political system.

“The system in Qadisiya was not an inclusive democracy,” Gildroy told me. “The Supreme Council controlled the governorship. The tribal movement was a way to break the incumbent parties’ monopoly on power. If our end goal is democracy, this is a pretty big deal. The southern provincial governors that I dealt with would not shake my hand. They do not believe in secular government. They do not believe in a government that is not controlled by religion. The fact that every other man will shake my hand except for the power brokers says that we are backing a very extremist regime.”

Othman, who was, after all, a Shiite sheik, advised Team Phoenix how to begin its tribal initiative: with Sheik Taklef al-Jabour, the leader locally of the Jabouri tribe, which has both Sunni and Shiite members throughout Iraq. Taklef was strikingly different from Othman. Unlike the monogamous and abstemious Othman, he had multiple wives and was not averse to a drink. Some of his tribesmen had a reputation for robbing travelers who ventured through their area. But Taklef was secular and felt marginalized by the local governor, a stalwart in Abdul Aziz al-Hakim’s Islamic Supreme Council party.

Meeting in Othman’s office, the marines began to outline the idea. The discussion devolved into haggling over Taklef’s commission until Team Phoenix simplified the proposition: The tribe would be paid $1,167 per kilometer each month to watch the road and keep it clear of improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, as the roadside bombs are known. The sheik would be in charge of distributing the funds and could hire as many tribesmen as he wished. To guard against infiltration by militias, the road guardians would be fingerprinted and have their retinas scanned, with the information entered into an intelligence database.

Taklef pondered the offer for a few days, then threw in his lot with the coalition. When the deal was struck, Team Phoenix explained that they expected a substantial decrease in the number of roadside bombs on his stretch of road. The Americans said they would provide him with a record of bomb explosions on the road so he could judge what would constitute a reduction. “Oh, I know the I.E.D. history,” he said with a wink.

After word of the program spread, dozens of sheiks began to approach Othman to get in on it. The next step was to import the program from the approach roads to the streets of the city. The sheiks were less of a force inside the city, so Team Phoenix put out the word that patrol volunteers would be paid slightly less than the pay scale for an Iraqi Army soldier. To protect the police’s prerogative, it was decided that the citizen-watch groups inside the city would not be armed. They would be equipped with radios to contact the police and would be outfitted with orange reflector belts for identification.

When the team took a squad of Iraqi soldiers to town on Nov. 14 to sign the first volunteers, hundreds of men of all ages showed up, and a near riot broke out; men who had not had a regular paycheck for years clamored for the jobs. In all, 268 volunteers were hired. Several weeks later they set up command bunkers and checkpoints and decorated them with Iraqi flags. Posters of Moktada al-Sadr were taken down and some new shops opened. Nonetheless, Lemons recalled, this was just a start. “You could patrol a mere five blocks north, east, south or west of Nahda and find the same poverty, violence, fear and hopelessness that had plagued Nahda only a few weeks earlier,” he said.

To reinforce security in Diwaniya, Othman requested additional troops and mounted a major, and fairly effective, Iraqi military operation named Lion Pounce.

V. Game Over

On Dec. 2, 2007, there was a meeting of the Ministerial Committee for National Security, a top-level body in Baghdad that Maliki and senior American officials used to coordinate policy. One agenda item was the Sons of Iraq, of which there were now more than 100,000, largely as a result of the Sunni Awakening. As the Americans saw it, the program was integral to the turnaround in Anbar and helped improve security in Abu Ghraib, Yusufiya, Diyala and even Baghdad. They wanted the Maliki government to integrate at least 20,000 and ideally 30,000 of the recruits into the Iraqi Army and police and find ways to employ the rest.

Maliki appeared to accept as many as 103,000 Sons of Iraq but insisted there could be no tribal Awakening in the Shiite south, his own power base. “The prime minister said, ‘Look, it is different in the south,’ ” recalled a senior American official who asked not to be named, because of the sensitivity of the subject. “ ‘There is not the same security imperative there. The Iraqi security forces can take on the security threat that comes from militias. It is not a question of the tribes being actively in bed with the militia. There is a different security dynamic. The Awakening would be a political movement. That is not what the coalition should be doing.’ I think he did not want us to be creating political movements to challenge him. I have got to say there is some merit to that.”

In effect, Maliki had forced the Americans to choose between supporting the “powers that be” and the “powers that aren’t” — at least on the question of an American-brokered Shiite Awakening. Securing Maliki’s support for the overall effort was the top priority for Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General Petraeus. American officials accepted the prime minister’s decision, calculating, or hoping, that Iraq’s security forces would be able to establish control in the south and that the Shiite tribes would find a way to pursue their political ambitions when the provincial elections were held.

The high-level Baghdad deliberations stayed under wraps. But in late December, Gildroy received a call from General Buk, the Polish commander. Othman had called to say that the governor, Hamid Musa al-Khudari, had ordered the Diwaniya Awakening program shut down.

“We are fighting this?” Buk asked. Gildroy said she and Lemons would meet the next day in Othman’s office to clear up the misunderstanding. After all, Khudari had earlier accepted the operation. There had been many bumps in the road in Iraq, and this looked like just one more.

But at the meeting it quickly became clear this was no mere bump. Khudari was a longtime member of the Islamic Supreme Council party who left the country during Hussein’s war with Iran and spent almost two decades there. He was a conspicuously strict Islamist who refused even to have his photo taken with women. He had already had his differences with the Americans. When American and Polish troops distributed fertilizer to local tribesmen, Khudari ordered the police to seize one shipment so it could be passed out by his provincial administration. (Othman sent Iraqi soldiers in Humvees to take the fertilizer back.) These were battles for political influence and control of the province, and the governor did not intend to lose out to any local Awakening.

As the meeting got under way, Khudari began to rail against the neighborhood-watch program, claiming it might be influenced by militia. Gildroy responded that rampant unemployment was more likely to breed mischief. To the marines’ surprise, Othman did not come to the project’s defense. He had been involved in the negotiations with the sheiks, but he appeared to have new orders from Baghdad, which he would not confide. Gildroy later talked to an American officer in Baghdad and was told that the decision had been made at senior levels of the Iraqi and American governments. It represented a balancing of interests; and it would have to stand.

As the saga unfolded, a compromise of sorts was reached. The tribal guardians would continue to protect the roads, but the neighborhood watch would be disbanded in Diwaniya itself. When Khudari asked for a record of the recruits in the city, Gildroy built a small fire at Camp Echo and burned the list. She thought it might otherwise be used as an enemies list.

The marines went from checkpoint to checkpoint, informing puzzled Iraqis that they were out of business. They assured them that they would at least be paid as promised for their initial three months of service. At first the governor would only let them use a soccer field for the disbursements. I was with Gildroy when she went to make the last payment in March of this year. She grabbed a plastic bag full of $20 bills and climbed into an Iraqi Army Humvee for the drive to town. For several hours, I watched as a long line of young men in T-shirts and sandals made their way to an Iraqi police station, inked their names in a ledger, pocketed their modest payments and shuffled off. Few seemed to have any idea what they might do next.

Joining the police was not an option, according to Haidar, a 24-year-old who was trying to support an extended family. The typical bribe for securing a job in the city’s police force, he said, was an astronomical $700.

VI. After the Surge

In the ensuing months, Maliki made a number of bold moves to build up his authority. With little advance notice to American officials in Baghdad, he dispatched thousands of troops to Basra and the port of Umm Qasr, the main loading point for Iraq’s oil exports. After some initial confusion, the military operation succeeded, albeit with substantial assistance from the Americans, who carried out air strikes, provided military advisers and helped with planning and logistics. American intelligence later reported that some of the militias decided not to fight based on the (erroneous) rumor that 4,000 American soldiers were headed south.

In Sadr City, the Iraqi military also prevailed after two American battalions occupied the southernmost districts, firing numerous Hellfire missiles and carrying out Predator strikes. The Iraqis were able to negotiate a peaceful occupation of the rest of Sadr City, but the hard military groundwork had been laid by the Americans.

The Iraqi government billed the operations as a move to extend its sovereignty to lawless areas, and there is much truth to that. But some analysts also said they served another purpose: Maliki and his Supreme Council allies were not going to go into the provincial and national elections until the large population centers had been reclaimed from the Sadrists and other Shiite militias.

After years of hand-wringing over Maliki’s inability to govern, American officials were cheered that he managed to pull the levers of power and even take on some of the Shiite militias. Iraq, in the words of the scholar Vali Nasr, had gone from being a failed state to a fragile one. In Basra, Maliki had reached out to the Tamim tribe and even temporarily employed them in the fight. The relative peace in the south, American officials in Baghdad asserted, showed that Iraq’s forces were able to achieve a measure of security without the help of an Awakening movement.

Maliki’s assertiveness was on display again when he told Senator Barack Obama last month that he would like to see American combat forces depart by the end of 2010. Such statements were made with an eye to the provincial elections, as well as to next year’s vote for a new Iraqi Parliament. They reflected an exaggerated sense of what the Iraqi forces had been able to achieve on their own — and caught the American command by surprise.

With more than 500 parties or candidates already registered for the provincial vote, the real test of Iraqi politics will be the fairness of the votes and the ability of the government to deliver services to its citizens, the latter a sore issue for many Iraqis. Ultimately, all politics is local. In Qadisiya, there remained bitter feelings about the abandonment of tribal empowerment. Sheik Taklef told me that the governor and the Supreme Council had done little to improve services in the city. “These people don’t serve the interests of the Iraqis,” he said. “They wanted everything to go through them.” Muhammad Abdul Amir al-Shalan, sheik of the al-Aghrah tribe, agreed, saying, “There is no big local support for the governor and the Supreme Council. The services are worse now than they were before them. They are not competent. People are no longer supporting them.”

But Khudari, the governor, casts the sheiks as little more than braggarts profiteering off the Iraqi Army’s success. “We don’t think that there is a necessity to form Awakening councils here,” he said. “The tribes didn’t confront the terrorists; the local and federal governments did.”

Othman insisted that he had not worried about political pressure from Khudari but that it became impossible to push harder for the Awakening program when even the American command did not put its full weight behind the venture. Gildroy reported, however, that in her farewell meeting with Othman, he did seem to be wondering about how well he really fit into the new Iraq.

On July 16, Qadisiya Province was officially transferred to Iraqi government control. The American Embassy issued a statement congratulating the government but hinting at the tensions below the surface. “The United States and Multinational Force-Iraq congratulate the Government of Iraq on this important milestone,” the statement said. “The provincial and military leadership in Qadisiya will have to work cooperatively in order to attain the sustainable security necessary for long-term economic prosperity.”

There were tensions on the American side, too. The perspective of the Marines differed markedly from that of the American officials in Baghdad. The Marines saw the tribes as more secular than the fundamentalists in the religious parties. They were less confident that the provincial elections would be genuinely fair; and they were worried that efforts to buttress political stability appeared to have trumped the idea of democracy. After Diwaniya, Team Phoenix made trips to Sadr City and Basra: they concluded that much of the security there was the result of political deals, not the decisive application of force by the Iraqi state. And they wondered if those deals would hold.

Lemons, who is back at work at his skateboard company, had strong and unsettled feelings about his time in Diwaniya. “I am still trying to figure out the lesson,” he said. “Maybe the lesson is there are limits to what we can and cannot do in Iraq. I’ve tried separating myself from our work with the Sahawa” — Awakening — “and I can’t. I can’t ever face the tribes I worked with again because I broke a lot of promises. Those promises don’t mean much to anyone outside Diwaniya or to an overall strategy for this war, but I thought these were the promises my own government had sent me year after year to pursue. So while I would deploy again for my Marines and my Iraqi Army comrades, I don’t want to go to Iraq again if this is the way we do business.”

Gildroy, who is once again a civilian and who left Diwaniya vowing never to return, says she still believes Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy is producing results. “This war is critical to our national-security interests and has had an impact on Al Qaeda. I know we are creating a buffer zone,” she said. “We will not create a well-functioning democracy in Iraq, but we need to leave the region and Iraq in a stronger position than we went in both for their own security and to avoid another terrorist attack on America. I would do whatever General Petraeus asked or needed. I trust him and his character with my life.”

Moulton, who is headed to graduate school this year at Harvard for a joint program in business and government, said the episode illuminates both the importance of the south for the politicians in Baghdad and the brittleness of many of the gains. “Together with some brave young Polish and Iraqi soldiers, we did a lot to improve life in Diwaniya,” he said. “I can’t deny that. People were afraid to leave their houses when we arrived. Iraqis were crying when we left. But so much of what we did fell apart so quickly. It shows how fragile everything is today in Iraq. For all that we put into it, not least of all a year of our lives, I don’t know if any of it will last.”

Barnett: Study history to know global economy

By Thomas P.M. Barnett
Sunday, August 3, 2008

It is said that you can line up all the world's economists end to end and still never reach a conclusion. However, one crucial consensus seems to be emerging in recent years among market watchers: the Reagan era of deregulation is coming to an end.

This enduring push for deregulation among the world's advanced economies, triggered initially by Ronald Reagan and Britain's Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s, has fueled globalization's rapid advance around our planet ever since. Globalization is - first and foremost - the worldwide flow of investment capital.

When there's lots of private money on the table, historically the global economy expands in both size and reach. Cheaper money means more risk tolerance, so investors are willing to enter more dicey, somewhat off-grid environments. When money gets taken off the table, especially through higher taxes, everybody gets more conservative.

The West's willingness to engage in higher-risk overseas investments these past three decades is a major reason so many emerging markets were able to emerge. Sure, cheaper labor always beckons, but breaking up production chains and spreading their components around the world invites complexity's many invisible dangers.

The upside is that new consumers are created through rising incomes, triggering the rise of a global middle class of unprecedented size and purchasing power. The downside? Now the economic health of all involved requires more stability in more places of the world, meaning we need to police a wider universe of nefarious actors - both purposeful and accidental - capable of triggering unwanted turbulence.

A good historical analogy to this era is found in America's post-Civil War experience in rapidly integrating its trans-Mississippi West. You have to remember, these United States had started as a mere 13, then saw their numbers double in the early decades of the union, only to roughly double again in the years leading up to our Civil War and the half-century that followed.

Compare that expansion to the growth of the U.S.-engineered international liberal trade order following World War II: starting with a mere quarter of the world's population, the West remained essentially closed until the late 1970s-early 1980s, when modern globalization began to emerge. Now, most experts recognize a "bottom billion" that's poorly connected to the global economy, meaning more than four-fifths of the planet finds itself deeply or increasingly connected to our "interdependent" economic fate.

If these "states uniting" served as source code for modern globalization, superseding the unjust version set-up by Eurasia's many colonial powers, it only makes sense to remember what came after our own extensive period of frontier integration. The historical experience of first shaming and then taming America's rapacious capitalism, known as the Progressive Era, extended for several decades and brought with it a vast array of new rules and regulatory bodies.

Two challenges were being addressed simultaneously.

First, there was the process of integrating high-trust environments with low-trust environments - i.e., the already built-up and high-performing East with the still-being-built-out and far more rough-and-ready West. So in one loosely knitted-together country, you had years like 1876, when the first transcontinental express train arrived in San Francisco from New York and Gen. George Custer's cavalry regiment was wiped out by a Native American insurgency led by Crazy Horse. Some way to mark our centennial!

Second, there was the process of simply getting our collective arms around the rising complexity created from knitting together a series of regional economies into a truly integrated continental economy - in essence the world's first true superstate and logical forerunner of today's globalization.

Similar challenges confront us today in our ongoing attempts to administer our increasingly tumultuous global economy, only this time it's the more stable West absorbing the wild East. And yes, there's no shortage of imperious robber barons or radical insurgents to manage.

Intimidating? Sure.

But remember that we've been down this path before - and thrived magnificently.

Thomas P.M. Barnett (tom@thomaspmbarnett.com) is a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee's Howard Baker Center and author of the forthcoming book "Great Powers: America and the World After Bush."

© 2008 Knoxville News Sentinel

July 29, 2008, 5:18 pm
Leaving Baghdad: Comparing New York With Home
By AHMAD FADAM
Ahmad Fadam left Baghdad bureau in May to take up a visiting fellowship at the University of North Carolina.

Self-portrait by Ahmad Fadam
They are similar in some ways but at the same time very different. Both cities are loud. Both cities are filthy. Both cities have traffic jams. Both cities have many sects and nationalities, and both cities are full of concrete. But the noise in New York City is different than in Baghdad.

In Baghdad you can hear the sounds of explosions and you would know that people are dying. In New York you can hear how loud it is and you would know that people are either working or having fun.

Baghdad is so filthy because there are basically no services. In New York, it is filthy because there are lots of people living in it, so it is hard to keep clean all the time.

In Baghdad, you can find Arabs, both Sunnis and Shiites. You can see Kurds, Turkmen, Yazidis, Sabiats, Muslims and Christians. They used to live in harmony before the war, but not since and the sectarian ideology managed to find its way to the minds of the Iraqis. Everyone started to have his fears from the others. And everyone started talking about who is the majority and who are the minorities. It is not like before. Now Sunnis try to avoid going to Shiite neighborhoods and the Shiite do the same with Sunni neighborhoods. Other sects and nationalities were also crushed in the middle of the ongoing chaos. Many of them preferred to flee the country to where it is safer for them. Because the situation in Iraq reached a stage when Iraqis started killing each other just because they are from other sects.

In New York though, you can walk in the streets and see all the nationalities and ethnicities of the world walking, talking, working together and even maybe living together, in peace. It makes you think, “Those people are not from one origin. They are very different. The only thing in common is that they are humans. And yet, they are all living in an incredible harmony, working together to build a common society.”

In Iraq, the people who are supposed to be all Iraqis, who share the same country, who were born and raised and lived on the same land, are now killing each other and for ridiculous reasons. The word Iraqi is starting to disappear. People are not using it anymore. New words are replacing it now, like a Sunni Arab living in Iraq. Or a Shiite Arab, Kurd or Turkmen. There are no Iraqis anymore. There are sects and nationalities, and they are killing each other.

The surprising thing is when an Iraqi meets another Iraqi outside of Iraq. They feel Iraqi again; they hug like brothers again, and talk about their country and how they remember it and how it became. Their eyes get full of tears when they hear about the bad news coming from Iraq. So if this is how we feel for each other, then why are the Iraqis killing each other in Iraq? And for what?

In New York, like in Baghdad, you can see lots of concrete, lots of skyscrapers and beautiful buildings, in all kinds and designs, you feel surrounded and so tiny when walking in the streets of Manhattan, and sometimes you feel lost, but in a beautiful way.

In Baghdad, yes, there is lots and lots of concrete. But it is not used for building. On the contrary, even the buildings we had before are destroyed now. But this concrete we have in Baghdad was shipped to us along with this new democracy. It seems to be that whenever you have democracy, then you should have concrete. In New York there is democracy and there is also concrete, and it is used in a beautiful way.

But the concrete we have in Baghdad looks as ugly as the kind of democracy that came with it. It is used to block the roads and surround the Green Zone where the Iraqi government is hiding itself from the people. It is used to surround the neighborhoods of Baghdad which are now divided into small parts where people have became prisoners inside it. Democracy in Baghdad means if you are an official or a party member, then you can use concrete to close the street you live in and have it all for your self and bodyguards. Sometimes you can have two or three streets according to your rank.

Traffic jams are also something New York and Baghdad share, and of course in a different way. Traffic jams in New York because it is a very busy city, lots of people and lots of cars. But in Baghdad, which is not as busy as before because many people have left it, you can still have lots of traffic jams and especially in the day. Sometimes because there is a car bomb or an IED explosion, sometimes because there is an American or an Iraqi military convoy just standing there and blocking the road, for no reason. Sometimes because there are clashes going on and you can not change your destination, so you have to stay where you are until it is over, and you might get killed but — what the hell? — you can get killed anywhere in Baghdad.

Boom time for the global bourgeoisie
By Jim O’Neill
Published: July 15 2008 18:29 | Last updated: July 15 2008 18:29
In the midst of the current widespread gloom and doom in the west, it is important not to lose sight of the true structural themes shaping our era.

Linked to the current mood, commentators often depict an embattled and shrinking middle class, with sharply rising financial inequality. However, globally, this is simply not true. One of the most startlingly positive phenomena for many generations continues to unfold around the world. We are in the middle of an explosion of the world’s middle class.

As two of my colleagues, Dominic Wilson and Raluca Dragusanu, showed in a paper Goldman Sachs published last week (The Expanding Middle: The Exploding World Middle Class and Falling Global Inequality), about 70m people a year globally are entering this wealth group, as defined by those on incomes of between $6,000 and $30,000 (€3,800-€19,000, £3,900-£15,000), in purchasing power parity terms.

The phenomenon may continue for the next 20 years, with this global middle accelerating to 90m a year by 2030. If this happens, an astonishing 2bn people will have joined the ranks of the middle class. This demonstrates that, contrary to widespread opinion, global inequality is declining significantly, not increasing.

Behind this powerful development is, of course, the unfolding story of the Bric, as we dubbed Brazil, Russia, India and China back in 2001. In addition to the gloom surrounding cyclical challenges in the US and other developed economies, it is currently becoming fashionable to believe that the Bric story is about to be tipped over the edge by rising inflation, scarcity of resources and their own backlash against globalisation. Some slowing of rapid growth in these economies is bound to happen. Indeed, the sustainability of it might be helped by some softening.

But I believe this negative mood is overstated. In China, we are seeing evidence that inflation may have peaked three months ago. This week we are likely to hear consumer price inflation slowed to 7.1 per cent in June, the third consecutive monthly slowing, and we think annual inflation will be back below 4 per cent by early next year.

With this move, overall gross domestic product growth will slow below 10 per cent, but this decline will be led by exports and investment. The Chinese consumer is going to keep on spending. In fact, judging by the ongoing strength of retail sales, the Chinese shopper may already be spending more than his or her equivalent in the US.

In all our exciting 2050 projections, including those updated for the recent paper, we have assumed that Brazil, Russia, India and China all grow at notably slower rates than currently. The same is true for the other countries that make up the bulk of the exploding global middle.

The emergence of this group is led by China and India but, importantly, includes many other countries. Even without China and India, the expansion of the new middle classes would be about 20m a year. Middle-class citizens will appear in their millions in many other parts of Asia, central and eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. This is a Bric-driven phenomenon, but the “next 11” are making their contribution and other nations will also participate.

Dramatic changes in economic, social and political trends will probably follow, some of which are already beginning to emerge. According to news stories last Friday, Russia has already become Europe’s biggest car market, outstripping Germany, following dramatic first-half sales. Automakers are fleeing from Detroit to Moscow and St Petersburg. Battles about the right way to run global businesses, countries and trading between us all will inevitably grow. Meetings of the Group of Eight leading economies will become redundant features of the annual calendar, with a new group driving the world’s economic agenda.

It is also evident that poverty is dropping dramatically around the world. According to our calculations, the number of people living on incomes of less than $1,000 dollars a year ($2.75 a day) has already dropped significantly from about 50 per cent of the world’s population in the 1970s to 17 per cent by 2000. According to our numbers, it could be as low as 6 per cent by 2015. On the more familiar World Bank defin ition of one dollar a day, the same dramatic shift is evident. Probably no more than 5 per cent of the world’s population now suffers this indignity. Of course, this is too much, but as long as the forces of globalisation continue we expect it to drop further.

It is important for everyone in the so-called developed world to be constantly aware that these powerful shifts in global wealth are good not only for the developing world, but for them too. If you take a look at a chart of recent US export growth, you may well think you are looking at the wrong data series. But you are not. US exports are indeed growing at close to 20 per cent and it is this that is stopping the housing and credit crunch from driving the US into a deep recession. Aspects of the same phenomenon can be seen in Japan, Germany and even the UK.

The new middle-class explosion is going to remain the market opportunity for us all, or certainly for those of us who are prepared to respond to the new realities.

The writer is chief economist at Goldman Sachs