Sunday, September 21, 2008

Contrast Iraq of 2006 & Iraq of 2008

Pulitzer winner Dexter Filkins of the NYT writes on how Iraq has changed since he was last there in 2006.

But if this is not peace, it is not war, either — at least not the war I knew. When I left Iraq in the summer of 2006, after living three and a half years here following the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, I believed that evil had triumphed, and that it would be many years before it might be stopped. Iraq, filled with so many people living so close together, nurturing dark and unknowable grievances, seemed destined for a ghastly unraveling.

And now, in the late summer of 2008, comes the calm. Violence has dropped by as much as 90 percent. A handful of the five million Iraqis who fled their homes — one-sixth of all Iraqis — are beginning to return. The mornings, once punctuated by the sounds of exploding bombs, are still. Is it possible that the rage, the thirst for revenge, the sectarian furies, have begun to fade? That Iraqis have been exhausted and frightened by what they have seen?


Read it all. The picture isn't all rosey, but it's a breath of fresh air to see a major outlet reporting from Iraq and going beyond the casualty lists (though with the drop of voilence they've stoped doing even that).

Via Hotair.

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