A need for patience

Victor Davis Hanson:

Screaming Iraqis and mangled body parts still dominate Americans' nightly two minutes of news from Iraq. And, indeed, Iraq is still a scary place within the Sunni Triangle.

Opposition politicians in the United States charge that our troops don't have enough body protection or heavily armored Humvees — suggesting that our fighters have been almost criminally ignored. On CNN, a journalist laments that a prominent news colleague severely wounded near Taji is emblematic of the mess of the entire American effort.

But Iraq, like all wars, is not static. What was supposedly true on the ground in Iraq in 2003 is not necessarily so in 2006 — in the way that the situation in Europe in 1943 hardly resembled that of May 1945.

Yet while things have changed radically in Iraq, the pessimistic tone of our reporting remains calcified. Little is written about the new Iraqi government, the emergence of the Iraqi security forces or the radically changing role of the American military.

I recently listened to members of the newly elected Iraqi provincial council in strife-torn Kirkuk. All were enthusiastic about their new responsibilities. They were unabashedly argumentative with one another over security, electricity and oil production — but still confident that they could govern their own affairs. As the meeting broke up, a female council member whispered, "Tell the Americans thanks, but ask them to have patience with us."

She's right: Patience, more than anything, is now needed in Iraq. There are now 10 Iraqi divisions. The newest is the 9th Mechanized Division, at Taji, of Maj. Gen. Bashar Ayoub, trained under the auspices of Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey's officers of the Multinational Security Transition Command.

A Patton-like veteran of three bloody wars, Gen. Bashar Ayoub has fashioned ex nihilo a new division replete with refurbished Soviet T-72 tanks and scores of veteran officers from the old Iraqi army. He plans to take over most of the security of Taji, and was out on the streets with his men even before his division fully materialized.

Two years ago, the conventional wisdom was that we wrongly disbanded the Iraqi army and dumped shoddy equipment on what little we rounded up. Soon the new complaint will no doubt emerge that we have redeployed too many officers from the old corps, and that their brigades appear too lethal in new uniforms, body armor and mechanized vehicles.

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