Iraq is a better place—despite latest bloodbath
Tom Streithorst
Iraqis will re-elect Nouri Maliki not because they like him, but because they crave strong government.
I’m a cameraman, so facts have never been my strong suit. Vibe and mood are. And despite Sunday’s brutal bombing, the mood in Baghdad is worlds away from the dark days of 2006-2007, when ordinary Iraqis feared driving home, feared the militia checkpoints where so many had been taken out of their cars, tortured and killed.
Baghdad is much more tranquil now. If you are stopped on the streets, it is by the police—and the police is no longer just another Shia death squad. The Americans like to think that “the surge” is responsible for the decrease in violence. I disagree. Baghdad in 2006 was as close to Hobbes’s state of nature as any place I ever hope to visit. Civil war understates the hell that Iraq had become. Civil war suggests two sides, maybe three. Back then, every neighborhood, nearly every block had its own militia. Iraq, for 35 years ruled by the Ba’athist Leviathan, had descended very quickly into Hobbes’s “war of all against all.”
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