There Is No Good News Story Here; for all the new schools and clinics built and polls taken about a better life courtesy of the U.S. military, this story about the gleeful murder of two American soldiers is too telling for me. This is still a war, it is not yet country building, or peacekeeping until democracy buds and blooms. To argue that it is only a few hundred Iraqis fighting this guerrilla war in any one concentration, while true, is not meaningful. The proportion of a people actually doing the fighting in an insurgency is always a small percentage of the populace. The numbers that are meaningful are how many people sympathize with the fighters, or at least do not in any way attempt to deter them--such as providing information to coalition forces, or denying insurgents food or shelter, anything that would lead to their inability to fight effectively.
MOSUL, Iraq, Nov. 26 — Since the Americans came to town seven months ago, the firefighters in this northern Iraqi city have gotten new trucks and new uniforms, American training and salaries 10 times larger than they used to be.
But when word came Sunday afternoon that two American soldiers had been shot in the head and killed a block away, the men of Ras al Jada fire station ran to the site and looked on with glee as a crowd of locals dragged the Americans from their car and tore off their watches and jackets and boots.
"I was happy, everyone was happy," Waadallah Muhammad, one of the firefighters, said as he stood in front of the firehouse. "The Americans, yes, they do good things, but only to enhance their reputation. They are occupiers. We want them to leave."
It was not supposed to be this way in Mosul, an ethnically diverse city of two million people and the economic and cultural center of northern Iraq.
As places like Ramadi and Falluja and Tikrit burned and their residents rebelled against the American occupation this summer, Mosul stayed calm, the one city with a Sunni Arab majority where most people still seemed to regard the Americans as their friends. A vigorous and far-reaching effort by the 101st Airborne Division to rebuild the city's roads, schools and public buildings seemed to cement an unusually warm bond.
That appears to be changing very fast. The money the American occupiers once doled out freely has dried up, and other reconstruction aid has yet to arrive. Attacks on Americans, which have killed more than 25 in the Mosul area this month, have highlighted what local Iraqis say is a rapidly deteriorating relationship. ...
A network of former members of Mr. Hussein's Baath Party, stretching from the universities to government offices, openly flout the Americans' edicts and, some Iraqis say, quietly support the resistance.
"I would say that the number of people who are opposed to the Americans here numbers in the thousands, the tens of thousands," said Hunien Kadu, a professor of economics at Mosul University and a city council member. "There are deans and assistant deans who were high-ranking members of the Baath Party. There are Baathists all through the government. The Americans can't continue to let these people operate."
Many Iraqis complained that the recent American crackdown had pushed potential supporters away. Mr. Barhawi, for instance, cited a local cleric detained on suspicion of encouraging attacks against the Americans in his weekly sermons. He said American troops had handcuffed, hooded and slapped the cleric. Word of that, he said, was helping to alienate many Iraqis here who were still more or less receptive to the American enterprise.
The cleric, Abdul Satar al-Jawiri, was released after a search of his home turned up nothing, Mr. Barhawi said. A spokesman for the 101st Airborne said Wednesday that he could not confirm the incident.
"I am not defending the cleric, but he was humiliated in public," Mr. Barhawi said. "Do you realize what he is going to say in his sermons now?"
To expect young American soldiers who know they are targets to have more civil attitudes is delusional. Soldiers are trained to kill and intimidate lest they be killed. It is war; a cleric gets slapped and the war goes on with more fuel in the belly of the war-beast. It is an equation as old as stone axes and flint arrowheads.
